Information Advocacy

Information should be free to reach you, honest when it gets there, and open to challenge after it arrives... and none of that is worth much without the skills, education, & context to actually use it. Everything below is the longer version of those two sentences.

I am an advocate for information. Reliable information is infrastructure, and like any infrastructure it needs people maintaining it.

What that covers for me:
- Access: free & open access to information, and open pipes to carry it
- Freedom of Speech / Expression / Press: the freedoms that keep information honest by keeping it contestable
- Context & Education: the perspective to understand what you read, and the education that builds both
- Critical Thinking: access without the skills, understanding, & context to use it is just noise; the reader matters as much as the source
- Peer Review & Revision: claims earn trust by surviving challenge, and correcting the record is part of the job
- Data & Information Integrity: provenance, accuracy, & accountability from the source all the way to the citation
- Anti-Misinformation & Bias Awareness: pushing back on misinformation while staying honest about bias, mine included

Two projects I am building aim to put these pillars into practice: infoSpread, a news ingestion & analysis pipeline over the GDELT Project's global data, and a synthesis review of agentic coding with LLMs (large language models). Both are early and private; email me if either interests you.

This is not a partisan cause. Every political belief needs open pipes and honest reporting, which is why Net Neutrality lives here for me and not in party politics. I will not pretend the fight has been nonpartisan, though: the votes at the FCC (the US Federal Communications Commission) split on party lines in 2015, 2017, and 2024. The need is universal even when the votes are not.

That said, I read plenty that leans, and I would rather name it than pretend otherwise. A few outlets I personally value have a clear left lean, like Democracy Now! (rated Left by AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check). I support their mission and say the bias out loud; that is a personal, politically aligned preference, distinct from the standards-based reporting I point to below, which aims for neutrality even where it carries its own lean. Politically I am also a member of the DSA, a socialist political organization and not a news source. All of that sits here, next to my politics, on purpose.

A note on 'bias free': information & science should aim to be bias free, and honesty about bias is how you get close. Opinion pieces have their place (I enjoy plenty), but my focus here is journalism/reporting, analysts & analysis, and peer-reviewed work, where the standard has to be higher.

Science and journalism need to be devoid of bias, religion, and political alignment to do their jobs; that is the standard I hold them to, even knowing humans will keep missing it. And the gaps are not abstract... sponsored content dressed as reporting, echo chambers and the algorithm design that feeds them, corporate bias, lack of education, and the inequality of education itself.

Public media, libraries, and education are the same fight to me: they feed information access, information access feeds democracy, and democracy is how human flourishing scales. Freedom on paper means little without the means to use it, so a lot of my advocacy is really about access. College is not the only honest path, and it is past time we stopped pretending it is. Trades, technical and apprenticeship routes, and plain self-teaching build real skill and real livelihoods, and they deserve the same respect and funding as a four-year degree; the political side of this stance lives in Education, STEM, & The Trades. What I want is for good information and good education to be reachable no matter someone's income, and for the resources to make reaching them realistic.

Accessibility is part of the same point. Information is only open if it is open to everyone, so captioning, screen-reader-friendly documents, plain-language options, and the accommodations the ADA (the Americans with Disabilities Act) was meant to guarantee are not extras; they are the difference between a right that exists and one that works.

Believing something is easy. The habits are the harder, more useful part, and a few I actually stand behind: support your local library & public media (the cheapest information infrastructure we have), vote in the local elections that decide both, and pay for at least one thing you value so it is not forced to sell you instead.

One reader's habit is worth more than any endorsement of mine: when a claim matters, do a little lateral reading before you share it... leave the page and check who is behind it, whether independent sources say the same thing, and what the original actually is. Fact-checkers and librarians have taught this for years. If you want the named version, look up SIFT (Mike Caulfield's) and 'lateral reading'. It is mostly just slowing down for the claims that matter. And I hold this one against myself first: the research on motivated reasoning says more information alone rarely changes what we want to believe, so the habits have to aim at my own conclusions too.

The organizations and projects doing this work, and why each matters. I am affiliated with none of them; this is simply where I point people:

• - News & reporting (I name the lean): Reuters (a wire service, rated Center / least-biased, the closest thing here to straight news), NPR with local/state public radio (CPR here in Colorado) and PBS (public, member-supported journalism; all three sit a little left of center, and saying so beats pretending they are perfectly neutral), Al Jazeera (broad international coverage, funded by the state of Qatar and rated mixed on factual record, so I read it with that in mind)
• - Fact-checking: the Poynter Institute (the infrastructure under fact-checking & media literacy, and home of the IFCN), the International Fact-Checking Network (the global umbrella, 170+ orgs), FactCheck.org (day-to-day record correcting)
• - Bias transparency: Ground News (not a newsroom itself; it lays third-party bias & factuality ratings side by side so you can see the spread)
• - Public science & data: NOAA & the National Weather Service (public science & weather data, free to everyone, quietly saving lives), the GDELT Project (open global news data)
• - Open scholarship: arXiv & DOAJ (open access), OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, & Crossref (open scholarly metadata & APIs; OpenAlex now meters its API behind a free key, though the data itself stays CC0), Retraction Watch (accountability & revision in the scientific record), the Center for Open Science (reproducibility)
• - Infrastructure: git & GitHub (version control & open collaboration; git itself is open source, GitHub is a proprietary Microsoft-owned platform, and I name that plainly because that is what this page is for), and public libraries (the original information advocates)

Products I pay for, and why (no affiliate links, just subscriptions I fund myself): Proton (privacy & encryption by default; a business model that isn't ad surveillance), Tidal (among the best per-stream payouts of the major services plus lossless & hi-res on the base tier; their direct-to-artist payout experiments ended in 2023, which I count as a loss). Where I put my politics, and the outlets I read with a lean, live in Not A Partisan Cause above and on my Political page.

If a page argues for peer review and correcting the record, it had better invite both. So: if I have something wrong here or in my work, tell me... email me and I will fix it and note what changed on the corrections page, rather than quietly editing it away. Corrections, reviews, & pushback are always welcome; that is the whole point of the pillar.