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What are some corporate websites that you consider extremely reputable sources of information?
I had a conversation with someone who teaches research skills at the university level. They said that incoming new students seem to start with the assumption that .org and .edu domain names can be trusted for accurate information and .com domain names will be unreliable.
I didn't find it hard to find dodgy nonprofits and sketchy colleges but do you know of any extremely reputable corporate sites that they could use as counter examples to this misinformed theory about how to find reliable sources online? I'm thinking maybe Bloomberg but would love to hear more.
I think a short answer to your question (for US based sources) would be: Reuters, or AP, though I would also strongly encourage people interested in this discussion to check out allsides.com (I have some gripes with allsides, but I think it's a solid starting point for people who are starting their education and still developing critical thinking.)
It's an interesting discussion though because judging the generalized accuracy of a news source is incredibly difficult because it presupposes that the one forming judgement has accurate information in the first place to make said judgement. I mean, unless we read an outlet's coverage of an event we personally witnessed, we can never really verify it's accuracy. Allsides has, imo, a pretty good write up about this here.
We then also have to consider if/how bias affects the accuracy of information. For example, two different outlets could report the facts accurately, but the presence of bias will shape that accuracy no matter what, whether intentionally or not. Again, allsides is helpful at illustrating this and does a good job of breaking down how events are portrayed by different publications.
To illustrate this point let's take a look at this bloomberg article that was posted here a few days ago.In Cold War II, The US Risks Playing the Soviet Role (linking to the comment thread rather than the actual article for context.)
The top comment on here by Nosewings illustrates an issue I take with Bloomberg's coverage here. I'll copy the segment they highlighted.
Is this statement true? Well, it is true that SF has safe injection sites, but does that make it accurate? The bias here is evident, and if you set aside any personal feelings you have on the actual topic at hand, it's hard to disagree that the writing style and bias shapes the presented accuracy. (On a semi-related note safe-injection sites drastically lower death rates and HIV infection rates)
I think this is all to say, that one of the reasons many people in my experience typically rate Reuters as factual is that it is often dry reporting that is (hopefully!) factual without much of the tone and bias we see in the above snippet.
You can't discount that Reuters is primarily a business/finance reporting outlet, and this colours the tone of reporting on most matters they cover.
I find FT.com, although it has the same base issue as Reuters, a lot more even handed in its coverage and tone, particularly on social issues.
How about research products done by employees and hosted on the corporate website? My field is computer graphics, so some examples that I can think of:
Many of these are pretty similar to what you'd find on a university department's publications page, with author's preprints of peer-reviewed papers, plus technical memos, conference talk abstracts, etc.
If we’re already going into specific fields, in a similar vein is mathematician and cryptographer djb’s cr.yp.to site, including e.g. the blog.
Amusing domain-hacky address, but features extremely state-of-the-art, often previously unpublished findings in the field,
in tremendous detail depending on which blog article/post or full scientific paper you’re reading.
Another one would be this PDF company’s knowledge base summarizing many aspects of the different PDF standards out there. Especially in software, often times you get authors or co-authors of standards who get to write about the topics elsewhere too, for example on a company page (not sure whether this is the case here, though).
Lots of academically published works are hosted on .com domains. Just checking some top ones, we've got nature.com, thelancet.com, cell.com, not to mention the publisher sites such as wiley.com and springer.com
The economist is generally considered the most trustworthy news site by the surveys I’ve read. They have a” voice “ that of course has bias but it is generally clear when it is being spoken versus the reports of the day.
The Economist has a pretty problematic history and a really conservative slant.
The Economist absolutely leans right, but it’s the rare sort of publication where I can read an article, strongly disagree with its thesis, but nonetheless come away informed and glad I read it. They’re reputable and their hype-free reporting style is hard to find in today’s media landscape.
Surely a news source can have a slant while still being reputable? Is this not inherent to almost any journalism? I've always viewed such a slant to be an independent factor from how much I trust a source.
It does have that voice that is paelo-conservative, not modern conservative - they have a cover about climate change targets not being met which isn’t very fox newsy for certain.
But the reporting is generally quite good. Eg https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-economist/
https://adfontesmedia.com/the-economist-bias-and-reliability/
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist
I find Bloomberg to have clickbaity titles sometimes, so if you just browse the titles, you'll often get the wrong impression on the content of the article. So, while I don't really doubt the facts presented in the articles, I wouldn't consider Bloomberg a site where you can avoid misinformation. I would say that news sites in general are just so-so at best due to the inaccuracies and spin, but for news sites I would generally trust AP or Reuters the most.
I think it's really hard to have broad rules on which websites to trust. Some critical thinking is usually required to be confident that you're looking at a reliable source or article. For example, if you want to know some details about a specific drug, the pharmaceutical company's website is a reliable website for that. They have a massive financial interest in making sure details like this are correct. If you want to know about what kind of unfair business practices that company has been engaging in, you'd have to go somewhere else. So it's not an easy rule, but if it's in the source's financial interest to be correct, that's probably a reliable source.
Then you have to have to skills to be able to read something and be able to tell whether they are BSing or not. Links to original source material are great, but sometimes articles get the details completely reversed, so you might have to actually check the source to be sure. That might require the skills to read a scientific abstract or dense government data tables. Then there's articles that use lots of "could" or "might" or "people are saying" that use a single anecdote to try to convince you to think a certain way, but they don't actually have substantial proof of what they're asserting.
It's kind of exhausting to deal with the amount of garbage that is out there. I think it does take a significant amount of skill and knowledge to sort out what is reliable and what is not. Even good sources can become bad sources over time, so you really need the BS detection skills, not just a set of rules to follow. It makes sense that there are people who are teaching these skills in school.
Ars Technica comes immediately to mind. As do the traditional news sources of the AP, Reuters, BBC, New York Times, and CNN (the others I'm thinking of have .orgs addresses). Hacker News has the issues of being a link aggregator, but it's rule requiring primary sources tends to avoid some of the nonsense and is therefore worth noting.
Both the New York Times and the BBC have pretty poor records when it comes to reporting on trams issues, though. I don't think it's really possible to make an unequivocated recommendation for any news source, and we should make a point of recognizing potential conflicts and histories of bad reporting even for those that we consider more generally reputable on the whole.
That's totally true. I didn't mean to suggest that they didn't have issues (they all do). My intention was to say that on the whole they tend to be decent sources for an overview level of information.
Yes! The more sources of "dot coms" are posted, the more I'm feeling that OP's hypothesis is incorrect and their alumni/faculty was actually right! The dot coms are rapidly becoming synonymous with "corrupt online capitalism"!
Hacker News also has the benefits of being an aggregator too, though (like multiple sources for stories so you can get a lot of stories that are sourced from smaller, more niche sites). And they’re pretty aggressive about moderating and changing links to the least sensational version of a story.
Regarding news sites, the question itself is a bit of an oxymoron. Or at least, you can't really have a corporate website that doesn't defend the financial/economic status quo even if they have to obscure or omit the truth.
For example, the AP or NPR can be accurate and factual on some things, while completely dropping the ball in others due to the outsized influence of money on what they choose to report and how they frame the topics.
Yes, but as @Carrow pointed out, corporate sites like the Lancet and Nature host scientific papers.
In my own field of law, law firm sites will frequently include short clear accessible articles and blogs about legal topics as a way to demonstrate expertise and helpfulness and to be discovered by search engines. When you are marketing your service as a competent intelligent expert, providing accurate information on a topic can improve your reputation and build your brand.
Scientific papers are not necessarily unbiased, and large scientific publishers can definitely have huge issues, especially when it comes to their own self-interest. That's not to discount them as useful sources of information, they are and are probably on the whole more reliable than mainstream news. But they don't serve as a counterpoint to thr fact that even places that are otherwise very good at reporting things in a fair and accurate way will often completely misrepresent other issues for various reasons (often to protect their own self-interests or the status quo). While the incentives in scientific publishing are different than for news sites, it's absolutely not the case that they're immune from things that negatively reflect their reputability on certain topics.
I hear you. The purpose of the exercise though is to communicate a better standard of assessing sources than the simple heuristic these kids have been taught. Currently they think, corporate = unreliable and nonprofit or educational organization = more reliable. They are going to miss good accessible knowledge if that is their only standard.
Back in school I was taught to avoid URLs with a
~in it. I later learned that URLs with a~were not "reputable" because they were often a user's home directory where they may have published content that was not officially affiliated with the main organization. Pretty silly.Well that's downright silly. Throw out all the faculty websites at university!
I like to check this out on occasion for media bias. https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/ there's also an interactive one, but the page feels a tad aggressive on mobile.
There's also Media Bias/Fact Check if you need to quickly find out a singular site.
Christian Science Monitor, ProPublica
Let me think.