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WITNESS
Jim Kirwan
This is a fool's errand that serves no real purpose because the premise on which this is based does not comport with how actual research must be done.
Back in the early sixties I was co-owner of an investigative magazine in Oklahoma. For a time I was an investigative reporter, and my partner was an ex-NSIA agent that was murdered while covering a story on Kerr-McGee Oil. That experience brought me from amateur to professional in a very short time, but I have continued using the unwritten rules of that profession throughout a rather long career.
Here is some of what I learned about evaluating information:
Virtually all "information" is imperfect by definition, because even with the best of intentions there are always hidden as well as covert forces that tend to sway the information in one direction or another.
"Intelligence" is an imperfect art comprised of carefully drawn conclusionsthat are always shifting, plus the information will usually conflict with competing interests which almost always involve any one of several different conclusions.
"There are NO absolutes in Counter-intelligence" - only better options and if you're lucky clearer possibilities. Yet these 'subjective conclusions are fraught with trade-offs and a variety to variable dangers that must each be weighed and evaluated against the realities of any given moment.
One example might be Amy Goodman. She is accused by many of being a disinformation agent, and therefore not trustworthy. This stems (in my case) from her refusal to cover the events of 911 in the kind of depth she uses on other topics. However Amy is in a unique position to provide the public with a great deal of information that would not otherwise see the light of day. Personally I keep myself aware of where she is weak or complicit; but I tend to take her other articles and interviews far more seriously than most - simply because she has been free to cover those stories in detail. The government will shut her down in 2009, just as they have already co-opted PRI, (that was just outted for accepting private-contractor status to write and produce propaganda for the Army in Iraq Public Radio International was one of four in that scandal)). This is an example of an imperfect source: however as real information is more valuable than gold, when unearthed at exactly the right time - I take what I have no reservations about and leave her questionable topics to others.
In the world of Alternative-Media there are very few saints: and most of the larger the sites, usually involve advertising or sales of some kind (which carries its own kinds of compromises - usually due to the need to stay financially viable). But as with everything else that "need" can sometimes create its own bias as to what gets covered and to what depth. Again the point is that professionals do not expect every source to agree with them 1,000 per cent: that is an oxymoron that simply never happens. So to attempt to rate sites by how you "feel" about the people reporting from there is not actually very useful.
It helps to think of information as an underwater current that moves through the body of water and carries with it the central themes of whatever is being discussed. If you get hung up on trying to de-bug a reporter or a site that harbors such reporters, you might just drown in a backwater as well as miss the actual point of that particular information stream.
What allows good reporters (or the quiet observers) to differentiate fact from fiction is the knowledge base that each has built into their own knowledge base, surrounding each topic: and obviously the more threads and history that various people have absorbed, the easier it is to tell the snags from the open channels: in the same way that disinformation tends to 'broadcast itself' to the seasoned eye, while the truth is usually more difficult to discern. . .
My point here was only to ask that you please remember that all information is as IMPERFECT, as are most of those trying to translate that information, into either some aspect of truth or to unveil that information for the lie that they may well-believe the story to be!
In any investigative story worth reading there are NO ABSOLUTES, because life tends to live in the gray areas between the cracks in the concrete that we continually try to claim for our own ground, from which to expound our thoughts!
kirwan