Narrowing Your Search—Find Reliable Sources

            You want to find sources that in the academic world (colleges and universities) command respect, and those sources give you authority as a writer, and that is more important than anything, when communicating to your reader—your colleagues, TA’s and professors.

            So, who are the best sources, the ones we can trust, the ones that have respect?

            For types of publications, online or on paper, here is a list, in order of reliability:

Journals—They command respect because they are written by professionals in the fields they discuss. Scientific American gets respect because those who write for it on issues in science are scientists themselves. (The Delta College databases can point out to you what is a journal, and what is not.) However, if a journal would seem to have a particular agenda, say a political one, then it would be compromised in articles about areas in which people of a particular profession would be biased. For example, If Shell Oil puts out a journal, they are all right to comment about issues of how to drill for oil, but might well be biased in commenting on human-made climate change, in which burning oil and oil products contributes in a big way to that problem, and Shell makes a lot of money by convincing us to continue to buy their gasoline.

 Some News Magazines and a few National Newspapers, and PBS in television—The New York Times the Washington Post and London’s The Guardian get respect for reporting on national and world issues, due to extensive investigation and checking of sources for accuracy. PBS—the Public Broadcasting Network in TV and NPR (National Public Radio) also get respect—they are partly funded by the American public and so have fewer biases than many news sites. Individual op-eds—editorials in those publications, by certain individuals, may reflect more political bias.                                                                                                                                                                                              reliability-definition- round magnifying glass enlarges the word "Reliability" on the page of a book and its definition below.    

Popular news magazines such as Time Magazine and Newsweek get some respect, though these sources do not get respect as much as many journals do. For beginning college-level essays, these sources are mostly considered okay. For issues in psychology, a popular magazine such as Psychology Today would have as much respect as Time or Newsweek. However, a journal in Psychology would get much more respect. Popular personality magazines such as People would command little respect except in pointing out how certain personalities are popular.

Local newspapers and newscasts are less respectable for national and world issues than the New York Times and the Washington Post as they often reflect the political bias of their viewers in a particular area, although, for issues that are local to the area in which they are reporting, those newspapers and TV stations get more respect. So, if the Sacramento Bee or Stockton Record report on how local businesses are faring during the pandemic, or the progress on the containment of local wildfires, they would likely be reliable sources for that, maybe more so than national sources. National TV Network news--CBS, NBC, and ABC get a medium amount of respect.

A news source such as Al Jazeera, a worldwide TV news source which reports news with an Arab perspective, may be considered biased, but may also give a perspective that American news sources do not report in full or even, maybe, at all. If balanced with others sources, they might provide a needed perspective.

3. Blogs on the Internet—the best and the worst—If whoever is putting out the blog is an expert in a particular field, that blog may get respect, such as Dave Hansen, a renowned climate scientist who pointed out before most did, the dangers of global warming and climate change. But Breibart News because of all the unfounded conspiracy theories it puts out, does not get respect. You need, then, to check out the qualifications of the person who is commenting on the blog and he credibility of the blog itself, to determine if that is a reliable source. This would include books as well.

4. Fox News rates low on the list of reliable sources, as they are considered to have an extreme political bias that taints most of their reporting and commentary, although their polling is considered top notch. Supermarket-sold tabloids such as The Enquirer command just as little respect in their news reporting. Religious oriented reporting may reflect a heavy bias towards those subscribing to that particular religion. Facebook rates low as well, as anything can be written there, including unfounded rumors, and (considerable evidence for this) falsehoods and misleading information planted by nations other than the U.S. in order to influence our political system.

5.  Politicians—need I say more?

         Something else to consider—how recent is your information? For certain topics, such as how Leonardo da Vinci pondered how to paint the Mona Lisa hundreds of years ago, the article or book written fifty years ago may be just as good a source as one published recently, but for shifting issues such as climate change, police brutality, or the current pandemic, you will want the most recent information as possible—even up to the last few weeks, in order to be considered reliable.

TA