The thing that also frustrates me is they always say to Make sure a website is proper. Yet they say nothing about print source and Ive seen inaccuracies in articles, even in big magazines. I could even possibly bring up a list but I might get in trouble if I do that. Maybe if a moderator clears it I could.
Well, part of the thing is, internet is new media.
Rule #1 of Media: New media is SCARY.
I kid you not, this is something that we learned verbatim in our COM 121 class. Print media is
old. And when I say "old", I mean
old. This means that it's treated with a lot more scrutiny than other things. People mistrust it more, especially older people.
The next part of the thing is, the business model of the internet doesn't care about accuracy. Nobody holds hosting companies accountable for the content of their websites, because hosting companies don't do that. They provide space. So, ultimately, it's the people who make the websites who have to be held accountable. And there's enough people out there using free websites that it doesn't matter how accurate their sites are. They're not paying any money, so it's a win-win situation regardless.
The third part of the issue is that the internet is anonymous. Print sources
always have a paper trail behind them, and you can track down the authors of an article. Websites? Not always. And those same people who provide approval or disapproval to websites (the only quality control mechanism out there) are unknown peers.
In short, there's a general lack of reliable guarantee on websites, which is why they're considered beneath print sources. Print sources aren't 100% reliable, but they'll be trusted over websites.
The problem being, of course, that teachers don't generally care about fact-checking, because they have such a workload. It's more that they want to see you do research.
