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Sources

Only the best for Dr. Spade, and you.

Why Dr. Spade draws so many quotes from conservative sources.

Dr. Spade loves to quote The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The New York Post almost as much as he loves to quote

Don "I stuffed it like a turkey" Young.

(R-AK, head of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and proud father of, among other things, a new "Don Young" bridge in a little-seen part of Alaska).

Those sources are his favorite because they are

• Conservative

Some conservatives simply won't believe anything from a neutral source. To them, "unbiased" means "conservative."

To Dr. Spade, that means we are wasting alphabet letters on the previously useful term "unbiased," but he tries to reach his audience where they live.

• Mainstream

Sadly, some extremists doubt anything they read in the mainstream press, preferring to believe news on Iraq known only to the one-man author of a newsletter in Montana than to believe, say, the eyewitness account of a Times reporter.

But the facts in the mainstream media are generally quite good. They act as checks on one another, and they take their accuracy seriously.

Witness the beating the New York Times gave itself over reporter Jayson Blair.

Can you remember any of his lies?

Of course not! They were too small and bland to sink in.

He lied, for example, about conducting an interview in person when he did it over the phone. Ooooooooh. Still, it should be reassuring that the Times takes itself so seriously.

If you -- or Dr. Spade -- can find a "fact" listed only on a biased website, it probably isn't accurate (and Dr. Spade won't include it). This isn't the Drudge Report.

When conservative sources are unavailable or less complete than another source, Dr. Spade will use the most reliable independent or liberal sources available. All conservative brainwashing aside, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and several international papers are very thorough in their reporting.

Finally, whenever possible, Dr. Spade will pick the most unbiased of possible sources. Well, that's not quite true. If there's a conservative one, he'll choose that first, since it will lead to fewer dumb objections from the Peanut Gallery.

Frankly, Dr. Spade does not consider The Washington Times or The New York Post to be in the same league as The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, but he knows you ditto-heads like them, so he uses them when available.

You'll also see Dr. Spade make many quotes from conservative forums, but never from liberal ones for support. He knows you'd dismiss them out of hand (which you should do with conservative forums, too, but Dr. Spade does not kid himself).

There is a direct correlation between the bias of a source and it's reliability. FreeRepublic.com is further away from the balance point than is Fox News which is still much further than The Economist.  The editorial pages of all papers are more biased than the news sections.

The "liberal" papers cited here -- Times, Post, Times, usually -- are all very close to neutral on the scale of things, though Dr. Spade knows he won't convince you of it.

(Though Dr. Spade did, miraculously, once convince a Republican friend about the greater bias of the Washington Times versus the Washington Post. For three months before the 2000 election, each ticked off the stories on the front page as being

•  critical of Bush

•  supportive of Bush

•  critical of Gore

•  supportive of Gore

They both found that while the Post  often ran articles critical of Gore, the Times had NONE critical of Bush. Not once in three months. It also had only two that praised Gore, compared to dozens in the Post that said favorable things about Bush. Dr. Spade's Republican friend did not change his vote, but he did admit to the conservative bias of his favorite medium.)