Posted by gunnar on July 2, 2009, 15:43:17, in reply to ""one would expect a wider spread of sources cited""
Hi Raoul
You appear to concede now that there's nothing much of substance to criticise, though you can't quite shake the feeling that something's somehow dodgy about IBC, which is quite conceivably related to a certain smear campaign, and the fearless seekers of talking points who ran it.
Raoul, could you please stick to what I have written all the way along instead of attacking straw men. Again, I was initially replying to Anna's point giving the impression of IBC using 192 data sources. When I looked in more detail IBC is relying for 95% of their reported death count on 21 sources. That is all.
If you'd worked in a newsroom, and seen how much of the news is drawn from newswires (or how much of the foreign footage on TV comes from Reuters and AP), you wouldn't expect a wider range of sources to be cited.
If I was to look at 192 news sources daily and treat them all equally in my reporting, I would expect to have a close to equal distribution of news sources citied in my database.
Personally, I do not have a problem with the majority of incident reported relying on a minority of the 192 sources. It would be good though, if this was clearly communicated.
Either deaths are reported or they aren't. Most aren't. But if they're being reported somewhere, and IBC isn't tallying those numbers, that's a point worth making.
Correct, I am not making the point. I have not even set out to make it!
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