So thanks to a link from the Showtime page on The Tudors, this blog got over 100 unique hits today, and the day is not even over yet. I think the previous record was around 30, and that was a day when I e-mailed all my friends and some of them e-mailed all of their friends.

And it occurs to me that I’ve been kind of hard on the media lately. Now that my readership has widened somewhat, I am concerned that some may have been disturbed by last week’s Question of the Week which involved my putting legitimate news sources alongside more questionable ones and asking my readers to rank them in order of reliability.

Please know that I meant no disrespect to Fox News. Or to CNN. Or to network television. Or to the New York Times editorial page. I’m simply raising questions.

The sources we have always been told we can trust may not be as reliable as we’d like them to be. But does this mark a decline in mainstream news reporting, or have these sources always been somewhat unreliable and it’s only through the more democratic medium of the Internet that we’re able to stay on top of it?

The reason I bring it up is that this study suggests that the shifts in the last twenty years have not resulted in a more informed electorate.

That surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Howard Dean turned himself from being a dead-end candidate into the front runner for the Democratic nomination in 2004 by raising money through a grassroots movement over the Internet. It was a groundbreaking use of the new medium. But then it was the traditional media who ruined him by playing that one clip, taken out of context, over and over. And it seems that the winners are the ones who know how to play the system. So the democratic process is still controlled by slick marketing experts. Perhaps nothing has changed since the days of Parson Weems.

Parson Weems, a supporter of Thomas Jefferson, wanted to emphasize strong values in young America. So he wrote a fictional story about the late George Washington to illustrate his point. Perhaps you’ve heard it – it involves a hatchet and a cherry tree.

Today’s version of the mythmaker, Karl Rove, has access to 24-hour information networks, both on cable and over the Internet. But so do we. Lies spread faster than they used to, but corrections are immediate. It’s harder to get away with things now, at least with those of us who are paying attention. In the days of Parson Weems, you couldn’t just go to Snopes.com to see if that cherry tree thing was true. And you certainly couldn’t just stumble upon some guy’s blog through a link from the Showtime website and get a rambling media literacy diatribe.

But it’s today, and you just did. Welcome! This blog is often about Shakespeare, but as you can tell, it’s about other things too. I hope you enjoy yourself while you’re here, and please feel free to leave a comment behind on any of the posts, either current or in the archives.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who answered last week’s question about the reliability of Wikipedia. The discussion there was one of the most vibrant of the blog so far. Between that and the subsequent post about Fox News, it made me realize that there is a larger question we need to address here: What does it mean for a source to be reliable?

The answer may be changing with the culture, and some quick background reading may help support that potentially controversial claim. Cynthia points us to the article in the The Chronicle for Higher Education The Intellectual in the Infosphere, which hits a lot of key issues in a short space and is definitely worth checking out. I also have an earlier post about the changing nature of information in the digital age. And then there’s the Karl Fisch video.

So with all that in mind, it’s as important as it’s ever been to ask what it actually means for a source to be reliable. Does it simply mean that we can count on it for accurate facts? Or do we require more from our sources than just fact checking?

Is it important for a source to give us balance between different points of view? Or can a source be reliable and just give us one point of view? And if the source only provides one point of view, how important is it for the source to share our values? Could different sources be reliable for different people, or is reliable meant to be an objective term?

Is a source that provides a more depth of coverage always more reliable than a superficial one? Does quality of writing affect reliability? Does a proven track record count for anything? Or do these factors co-exist with reliability without affecting it? Is a primary source always more reliable than a secondary source? Or can secondary sources bring qualities to the table that can increase reliability?

And does reliability cover just facts? Or can sources also provide opinions? Are you more likely to be persuaded to share an opinion that’s expressed by a source you already trust? Is that a part of reliability? Is it even possible for a source to be value neutral? Or does a source always have an inherent value system by the choices it makes in what information to present? If a source presents information in a way that doesn’t fit your worldview, which sources can affect your willingness to reevaluate that worldview, and which sources would simply make you doubt the source?

Does the element of time affect reliability? The book you purchase in the book store may have been written months ago, while a website might be updated while you’re reading it. Does this affect reliability, and if so, in which direction?

Once you’ve answered these questions for yourself, I’d like you to consider the relative reliability of the following twenty sources when it comes to information, perspectives, and opinions about, say, the Bush administration:

A. Joe Biden on This Week with George Stephanopoulos
B. Wolf Blitzer on CNN
C. Dick Cheney on Meet the Press
D. Noam Chomsky in a new book published by AK Press
E. Katie Couric on The CBS Evening News
F. The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 2007 edition (Hardcover)
G. Thomas Friedman in a New York Times Op-Ed
H. Seymour Hersh in the current issue of The New Yorker
I. Brit Hume on Fox News
J. Russ Kick in a new book published by the Disinformation Company
K. Rush Limbaugh on his radio show
L. Michael Moore in a new documentary
M. Sean Penn while accepting an acting award
N. Tony Snow from the White House briefing room
O. Jon Stewart on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show
P. The White House website
Q. Christie Todd Whitman on Real Time with Bill Maher
R. Wikipedia in an entry with no controversy alerts
S. Bob Woodward in a new book published by Simon & Schuster
T. Markos Zuniga on his blog The Daily Kos

I lettered them instead of numbering them because you may wish, as part of your answer to the question below, to rank some or all of these twenty sources in order from most reliable to least reliable. If two of these sources gave conflicting information, which would you be more open to, and why? What if their information didn’t conflict, but they selcted facts that promoted different biases? What if their facts were the same, but they presented conflicting opinions?

What does it mean to you for a source to be reliable?

Discuss.

Fox News has a reputation for being nothing more than a right wing propaganda machine, and that may be true to a point. But it should be remembered that they do a pretty good job covering a wide range of non-partisan arenas, for example, financial news.

Of course, there will always be some that see right wing bias everywhere, but I’ll let you be the judge.