Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 4/Independence of sources

What does it take for a reliable source to be reliable? We talked about the kind of source it is: an academic source, a reputable publisher. But another important thing is that the source needs to be independent of the subject, of the article subject.

What does it mean? It means the the source needs to be outside the control of the person or company or body that the article is about. If your article is about giraffes, that's not a concern because giraffes don't care what Wikipedia says. But if your article is about a person, or a company, or a rock band, or anyone who might care, we want to show that the sources we rely on are not manipulated by people who would care what the article says.

Sources that are controlled by the article subject, by the person or the company, may still tell the truth, of course --not everybody lies! But they may be suspected of being too interested to be relied on as neutral. So ideally, we want a reliable source to be independent of the topic of the article, and also not related to the topic to the article subject by strong relations like family or like debt! If I write about one company that has a large debt to, say, Jeff Bezos, who owns the Wall Street Journal, I might want to not quote the Wall Street Journal on that, even though generally the Wall Street Journal is reliable, because potentially there might be a perception of skewed reporting.

I say this very carefully. The Wall Street Journal is a reputable and professional newspaper that I don't believe has skewed reporting because of Bezos's business interests, but we want to avoid even the impression that it might have been that way. But people who are employed by other people can be said to be under their control and therefore potentially non-neutral.

Here are some examples. A musical band's official Web site -- that's a Web site that they own -- is not independent, right? It's their own Web site. They can make it say whatever they want! It's not a reliable source, for most things. It can still be a reliable source for some things. Like what? What could we potentially cite to their Web site -- if we have an article about this rock band, this musical band?

Generally they are an involved source. They're not an independent source, so we wouldn't want to cite them for almost anything. But one thing we can cite from there, for example, is the makeup of the band -- who is in the band -- the members of the band, the musicians who are currently in the band -- can reasonably be cited from the band's own Web site. Right? Because after all, the members of a band that isn't a large business are generally not -- it's not a legal reality, right? Usually it's whoever the band says is a member of the band, right? I mean, we won't get a government source on the membership of the band.

We might get a newspaper or a music channel saying "these are the members of the band", but membership of a band can actually change, it can change over time, so, the band's own Web site is actually probably the best source we have for who is currently a member of the band.

The band's establishment date? Yeah. Who's to say when a band was established? It's pretty much what they tell you, the year they met, or the year they started playing together, privately. Now, you could say, this year is the year they put out their first album, because the existence of a musical album can be established in objective terms, through catalogs et cetera. And there might be articles covering, or critiquing, the album. So we could show the year that an album came out, but the band might have been playing together three, four, seventeen years before that! How do we know? We basically have to take their word for it. And again, we might have other sources. If a band tells us "we got together three years ago", but we have a publisehd interview that they gave as the band five years ago, well, then they got it wrong! They misremembered, and we actually have a better source that shows they had been a band already five years ago!

But to get back to the idea that sometimes we can cite very specific, very narrow pieces of information, we can cite from a non independent source, from a source that is connected to the article topic. And that's an example of such a thing.

As I just mentioned in the example with the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper is generally not a reliable source for the business deals and business interests of its owner. These days, newspaper owners tend to be owners of lots of other things as well, other media channels or other companies. And it is sometimes problematic.

And by the way, if you're asking yourself, well, am I supposed to know all the business interests of, say, Jeff Bezos before I cite the Wall Street Journal? The answer is no. You can cite the Wall Street Journal, but someone may later say, "hey, you cited the Wall Street Journal about this company, and this company does have a business interest in...", and they might question it later, and then it might be appropriate to remove that citation. But I'm not saying that you have to do complete market research about everybody's business interests in advance. I'm just saying that's one reason why you might want to avoid that source, if you know that they are not independent of the subject.