General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy naturalnews.com is not a suitable source for anything on DU.
See these ads from that site. These are paid ads, accepted by that website. What do you think:
Snake oil central. My suggestion if you have a black mole on your lip? Go see a dermatologist. Don't buy that crap. You might save your life.
postulater
(5,075 posts)'Progressives'.
You should see the ads on there. All kinds of crap. I wouldn't trust anyone's opinions from there.
MineralMan
(146,192 posts)DU does not receive money to place specific ads. naturalnews.com has those same ads visible all the time. Sorry.
Zorra
(27,670 posts)gratuitous
(82,849 posts)I think you'll need to do better than that. Right now on DU, I'm seeing an ad for Audi, but in the past, I've seen promos for Jesus Camp, and some Glenn Beck goldbug scheme. When I click back to the main GD page, there's an ad for some clinical study at Tulane that looks kind of fishy.
Website ads are not a measure of the reliability or unreliability of the site's content.
MineralMan
(146,192 posts)Did you know that the government owns everyone's DNA? I didn't know that, but it's on over at naturalnews.com.
http://blogs.naturalnews.com/us-government-claims-100-ownership-over-all-your-dna-and-reproductive-rights-genetic-slavery-is-already-here/
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)I'm not here to pass judgment on anyone's site. I'm just saying that deciding a site's reliability based solely on its ads - as your original post does - is a fool's errand. I gave you examples from right here at DU (which is currently favoring me with ads for LifeLock and sending money by Western Union, two products of dubious quality and efficacy) about why that's not a good idea.
If the content of the articles at naturalnews.com is specious, give the whys and wherefores. If you can't do that, you're not making a very strong case.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)zappaman
(20,605 posts)Thought you would know that being a GD host.
Ask around.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)Autumn
(44,762 posts)Please post it and share.
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)locking, and banning project? I can see how that would be a power trip for some.
zappaman
(20,605 posts)There is more but I thought you would appreciate this one...
rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)that gives them carte blanche to decide which sites are "kooky". Ah the power to lock and hide, hide and lock, and ban. Working hard to protect DU from the nasty outside world of "kooky" sites. No thank you, I would rather make my own mind up as to the danger of reading something from a "banned" site. You dont give liberals enough credit.
Locking, hiding and banning sounds more like conservative behavior than politically liberal behavior.
unblock
(51,974 posts)exactly what sites have *you* been visiting lately, mineralman?
bettyellen
(47,209 posts)was total RW spin, LOL.
JaneyVee
(19,877 posts)Spend money for a placebo whose only effect is making you smell like oregano. Save your $, buy a pizza.
marle35
(172 posts)It's an effective anti-biotic.
The_Commonist
(2,518 posts)Which is too bad, really, 'cause you're one of the good guys, MM.
Yes, there are plenty of reasons to not use naturalnews as a source.
But pointing to their scammy ads is not gonna cut it.
I've seen plenty of horrible ads here on DU.
And saying "well, it's Google!" is no excuse.
If the owners of DU didn't want scammy ads served by Google, they would not have signed up for the service. Therefore, the owners of DU are just as responsible for the scammy ads on their site as the owners of naturalnews are on theirs.
Its a fail, but that's OK.
We're all allowed a fail once in awhile...
Lucinda
(31,170 posts)Wouldn't have found it without your post...so thanks.
NYC Liberal
(20,132 posts)The Birthers just don't know when to quit, do they? Now that the White House has released President Obama's birth certificate, the case is now closed, but they just won't stop ranting about it. Why are these birthers still complaining?
They claim the birth certificate document is a fake. Why does that matter? But of course the document is a fake. It's not "merely" fake; it's so fake that the whole thing has become an IQ test for figuring out how many people can be so easily fooled by a fake. If I turned in a document like this as part of an effort to get a home loan, for example, and I assembled it layer by layer with obvious cutting and pasting of numbers from multiple sources in order to fake my reported income levels, I would be guilty of a felony crime. At the very least, I would be laughed out of the room. "Are you kidding me? This is your best attempt at falsifying an income statement?" they would say. Even a high school kid with a scanner and Photoshop knows how to make a more convincing forgery than this...
http://web.archive.org/web/20120504053520/http://www.naturalnews.com/032217_Obama_birth_certificate.html
I did some checking around and found that one Google engineer says the date is a "glitch." That seems odd, since Google's date property seems to be accurate for everything else I can find.
For example, I wrote a story about the mysterious death of John Noveske yesterday. If you run a Google search for it, using the date parameter, it correctly lists the exact HOUR of my publication of that page.
Click here to see the search results yourself.
So I'm not sure why Google search results would be correct about seemingly all the others pages it indexes, but somehow wrong by three days on the United Way Sandy Hook fundraising page.
The "glitch" explanation seems suspect to me. It sounds like a quick answer to try to downplay something that could be the biggest story of the year. Because if the United Way knew about the Sandy Hook massacre three days before it actually happened, then the entire thing had to have been scripted.
http://web.archive.org/web/20130114000609/http://www.naturalnews.com/038633_Sandy_Hook_Google_search_results_December_11.html
kimbutgar
(20,882 posts)with the Alex Jones/Beck tea party bullshit. It no longer was a health site but an anti Obama and anti liberal conspiracy site The last straw for me was when Mike sent out a email saying the tea party were going to save the country and to vote republican to bring liberty and freedom back to the US. I finally unsubscribed. It was a good site at one time now it is a bunch of crap.
panader0
(25,816 posts)Although $5.15 a day seems a bit steep.
SidDithers
(44,228 posts)too bad certain GD Hosts refuse to exercise their responsibility and lock threads that use naturalnews as a source.
Articles from that site have no business on a progressive site like DU.
Naturalnews - generally regarded as the #1 anti-science website on the internet.
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4283
Sid