Okay, I realized tonight that for this blog to in any way serve the purpose of which I am attempting to accomplish that I need to clarify just what a 'source' is.
Dictionary.com defines the word source as: -noun 1. any thing or place from which some thing comes, arises, or is obtained; origin: Which foods are sources of calcium. 2. the beginning or place of origin of a stream or river. 3. a book, statement, person, etc. supplying information.
Notice the first statement of definition clarifies a source as being where something comes from. This is very important to remember these days as it seems to be easily confused when one discusses a news article. News articles themselves are not the source of the data that they present. They are a source of an opinion of that data, or the source of how that data was obtained, etc.
It is lazy for one to use the work of another as a source for their own statements or works and will quite likely end up with inaccurate information to continue to be presented as hard data to others. Did you ever play the 'phone game' as a child? This is where a group of children are placed in a circle and the leader of the exercise whispers into the first child's ear and that child turns to the child next to them and whispers what they think they heard, and this process continues until you get to the end. The exercise serves to show that information is quickly misconstrued or misrepresented the more it is passed on without the actual source of that information.
This is the first thing that I throw out when I choose to write about a topic. The news articles. I may be inspired by something that I read but I do not quote them as a source without having done my own research to verify the accuracy of the data presented, and then I'll present the finding of that research. Most likely quoting the findings not the articles that I researched.
