As about half a dozen readers know, I am currently hard at work helping VDARE.com with a certain book project. One of the more tedious tasks this requires is turning hyperlinks into footnotes. Blessedly, in the Current Year, the internet is here to help. I signed up for one of those citation automator websites, where you can paste the URL and get the footnote or endnote (in whatever style) you want with the push of a button or two.
Amusingly, this particular site, EasyBib, gives you its assessment as to whether or not it believes your source to be a good one or not. The results of this are less amusing:
Another example:
If you click that “Why?” you see at the bottom of each screenshot, this pops up:
But these guidelines do not explain why my two favorite dissident sites are deemed “not credible.” VDARE.com and AmRen are both updated regularly, publish experts, and provide sources for their claims. Indeed, some might say that VDARE.com is a bit overzealous in providing sources for their claims.
Along with Dissident Right sites, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid TV networks are frowned upon as well:
In the U.S., Fox News only gets a mid-level “may be credible".
To EasyBib’s credit, the hipster-feminist gossip site Jezebel earned a “not credible” as well:
Breitbart managed a “may be credible” rating—presumably because it is so popular it is harder to casually disparage them:
National Review, needless to say, got a good rating:
More interesting was how many very popular conservative websites had not been “evaluated” at all:
Why these three sites have not been evaluated is beyond me. Like it or not, all three sites are likely to be cited as a source given their incredible popularity. At the time of this writing, Gateway Pundit is the 2,316th most popular site in the country. The Daily Caller is the 192nd. RT is the 319th most popular site on the planet.
This citation website, EasyBib, is owned by the company Chegg, a major player in the lucrative business of everything higher-education. Its website invites feedback, just email: [email protected]
