unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [58]
With Republicans in control, reaching the site run by the Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee required a visitor to find the link labeled “Minority Website,” which appeared in tiny 8-point type hidden away near the bottom of the page. And the same went for nearly all other House and Senate committee websites: they spoke only for the majority party. When Democrats are in control these official sites may or may not become less partisan, so visitors should continue to be wary of them.
Not all committee sites were so one-sided. Two laudable exceptions were the Joint Committee on Taxation, which maintained a bipartisan staff of experts to estimate the effects of proposed tax bills on the federal budget, and the Congressional Budget Office, which did the same for a wide array of bills and government programs. That’s something we hope will continue, but visitors should be alert for any changes as partisan control of Congress shifts.
Websites sponsored by academic institutions can contain a wealth of solid information. Here look for the “dot-edu” extension on the domain name, as in nahic.ucsf.edu. This is the website of the National Adolescent Health Information Center (NAHIC), which is associated with the department of pediatrics at the University of California–San Francisco. The “edu” in the domain name is short for “education,” and only universities, colleges, and other accredited institutions of higher learning are allowed to use it. Research librarians searching the Internet for information on a new topic will often limit their searches to dot-edu and dot-gov websites, knowing they are much more likely to find authoritative information there than on a dot-com or dot-org website, which anybody can own.
However, the dot-edu extension is no guarantee of accuracy. Consider the example of Michael Bellesiles’s book on guns, discussed previously. Professors often post their current research papers on their own pages within the website of the college or university where they teach; while such papers can be excellent resources, they are also the work of only that one professor, and don’t carry the weight of the institution. Some colleges even give students personal web pages along with their dorm rooms and gym cards, and those pages all have dot-edu extensions too. If you find something on a university website that seems to contain the information you need, dig a little until you are satisfied that it was put there by experts you can trust, not by a freshman who’s about to flunk out.
News organizations also run websites—for example, www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com. In general, you can trust these sites to the same degree you would trust the news organizations that stand behind them. The BBC News website is superb for international news often ignored by U.S. news organizations. There’s no need to dismiss a news story just because it appears on the website of a local or regional newspaper: the website of the New Orleans Times-Picayune was among the very best sources of information for what was actually happening during the Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005, for example. For three days, the newspaper published only on the Web, because its printing plant was underwater, and eventually the quality of its reporting earned its staff two Pulitzer Prizes, including a gold medal for meritorious public service and the prize for reporting of breaking news. In this case, the information on a local newspaper’s website was far superior to that found on the government websites