Private Sector and Audience

Media literacy depends on a critical evaluation of websites. The textbook criteria for evaluating websites may include the source (whether it is a research-based organization or not), the audience (whether the audience is scholarly or general), the date of the material (which in science does matter), how the material is presented, and what other people say about the site or how the site is sourced. Language and diction can also play into whether websites are credible or not.

For example, the Website Globalwarming.org does look like a blog, and indeed it is one. The criteria of appearance already raises red flags about the credibility of the source. The "contributors" to the blog are listed as being the "Cooler Heads Coalition, an ad hoc coalition of more than two dozen free market and conservative non-profit groups in the U.S.

and abroad," meaning that the information does not come from a research-based science organization but from the private sector and admittedly "conservative non-profit groups." Their information is for a general and biased audience sympathetic to their point-of-view, even if by date criteria, the blog posts do happen to be recent. It is difficult to know what others "say" about this blog, other than to expect that as a blog, it will not be taken as a serious source of information by the scientific community.

A different example is seen with the NOAA (2016) National Climatic Data Center website. The website is not particularly attractive in appearance, but it is a real government website and the information is substantiated by real scientific research. Moreover, the information is up-to-date. The audience for the NOAA (2016) web site is varied, as a general audience can read and understand the jargon-free content, but can obtain follow-up literature through the sources listed on the website.

As NOAA (2016) is a known and respected organization, it is presumed that scientists will take what NOAA (2016) has to say seriously. The Globalchange.gov is another government-based website, but that alone does not make the information credible. Unlike NOAA, Globalchange.gov is not well-known as a research institution. However, Global Change is a program that "conducts state-of-the-art research to understand the interactive processes that influence the total Earth system," and can therefore be considered a research-based source of data. Unlike NOAA (2016), the research is more.