When you are immersed in reading, writing and thinking and you bounce through the internet looking at sources, reading and following up on them, checking them against other sources you will begin to notice mistake after mistake after mistake.
You will find so many inaccuracies that you’ll lose all confidence in sources. Teachers talk to their students about “reliable sources” but no such thing exists. Very few teachers have the time to notice this, especially early in their careers, so they might just have to take my word for it. There are no “reliable sources” – there is only “reliable information”, and even that is a bit sketchy.
Here’s today’s example. I’m writing a lesson that features the broadcast of Alex Haley’s Roots in January 1977. It’s a great way to expose students to the media landscape of the 1970s while exploring how the public understanding of slavery was shaped by the broadcast and how that confrontation with the past played out in the public with a document exercise reading editorials.
I was looking for the sales numbers of Haley’s book before the ABC broadcast and came across an 1992 obituary in the Washington Post
There is no way I’m going to tell students that the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1977 without checking it, especially when I know that won’t take more than 90 seconds to check. It might also be interesting to think about its designation as fiction – or nonfiction. But sure enough – the Washington Post obit was wrong.
Maybe there is more of a story here, maybe there was an issue with the fiction/nonfiction status – but one thing is for sure, the Post was wrong. Roots did get a “special citation” though.
You’d be right to say that I’m making too big a deal about this one little factoid, but that’s not really the point I’m making. The point I’m making is that there are no reliable sources, only reliable information.
Plus, there’s more where that came from. I’ve been tagging mistakes I’ve found in books for some time now.
Social Studies teachers stress “reliable sources” as they should, but I’d recommend the better approach is to stress “reliable information.” Instead of cajoling students to “get good sources” for their research or asking them which source they think is reliable in class discussions, focus instead on the information itself.
Don’t ask if a source is reliable – ask if the information itself is reliable.
There are plenty of reasons to ditch the phrase “reliable source”
Using the phrase “reliable source” suggests that there is such a thing. Do you think we could produce a list of sources that we would all agree are “reliable”?
The sources we commonly identify as “reliable” are institutions and institutions are filled with individuals. Are all of those individuals as reliable as the institution they work for? There are tenured college professors who deny the Holocaust, like Arthur Butz at Northwestern University or Kaukab Siddique at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. These institutions have turnover as well – is the Washington Post run by Katherine Graham the same Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos?
Sources might be reliable in some cases, but not in others. I’d like to think I’m a reliable source when it comes to talking about the past, but I know I’m not a reliable source when I’m asked if I took the last cookie.
“Reliable sources” comes from a time when producing content was time-consuming and expensive, and accessing that content took a lot of time and prodigious effort. We now live in a time when accessing a broad cross-section of content is cheap, easy, fast – and almost effortless. It’s much easier to find the mistakes.
Another reason is that when you keep talking about reliable sources, you’re also giving up a chance to teach a better skill – the skill of double-checking. Something you do yourself all the time.