The credibility of things posted on the internet

For this assignment I chose to examine an article from the Huffington Post.  The reason why I chose this is because I am a liberal and I know I tend to read publications that side with my point of view (although, I tend to shy away from MSNBC).  With the polarization of the political climate in America, I feel it is very important to examine this part of our daily lives.  A majority of us use the internet on the daily basis, and if you're reading this now, you are definitely using the internet.  As the link for our assignment says, "Anyone, in theory, can publish on the Web; therefore, it is imperative for users of the Web to develop a critical eye to evaluate the credibility of Internet information."  So examining this will be practical use for our global population. 

Since the Huffington Post leans liberal, I tried to find an article that may seem to have a liberal spin on it.  On the front page of HuffPo, I found this article, "Justice Scalia's Son Doesn't Think Homosexuality Really Exists."  It definitely caught my eye and it could possibly be written in a bias that could be used to ignite us liberals. 

My first alarm is that this article was curated from Right Wing Watch, as the bottom of the article has a link to the original article.  Obviously, this organization is going to have an agenda which is to keep check on the political right and making sure they don't fabricate any stories out there.  However, I can see this the other way as well, in that Right Wing Watch may overdramatize any little thing the opposite spectrum may say.  Because of my bias, I definitely saw this on Fox News a lot, but I even see this on MSNBC.  It's mainly the reason why I try to shy away from cable news in general. 

Next, I tried to follow up on the author of the article, Brian Tashman.  He is a blogger, and he is a research associate over at the People of the American Way, another activist group.  I honestly couldn't find much on him, except that he has a LinkedIn and Twitter account.  And I checked up on some of his writings, and he does point out, on his blog, some of the ridiculous things that the right-wing fundamentalists say, such as Glenn Beck calling Obamacare "Satanic" or Christian fundamentalist leaders claiming that gay marriage will bring down America.  So he does a good job curating evidence of the extreme right-wing pundits overdramatizing the current state of America.  But I have not found any writings of Brian Tashman published in scholarly journals.  So he does a good job of providing whistle-blowing evidence of what the right-wing are saying, but he does have a liberal bias.  I haven't seen anything where he criticizes MSNBC, but maybe I haven't dug deep enough. 

So yes, anyone can publish anything they want on the web.  But we should be responsible of the things we put on there.  The cable news channels live on this 24/7 cycle of sensationalizing the news.  It seems they are doing this for ratings instead of informing the public.  And of course, the way to drive up the ratings is to create fear and hysteria about the current state of affairs.  I may have said this before, but the documentary, Patriocracy, has made me more aware of what causes the climate of polarization in our country.  Of course, we must be wary of the other side overdramatizing the news, but we must not lower to that level as well.  Hopefully, with a more media literate public, we can break the gridlock in our country.