TruthAndPolitics.org

Related Sites

Why These Sites?

The sites in the table below have the following properties:

• the content is connected to politics and public policy;
• the organization implicitly addresses concerns raised in TruthAndPolitics.org's mission statement (though not necessarily effectively). That is, they organize their information content by topic, integrating knowledge in a manner that aids readers.

List of Related Sites

Website	Topics	Form of contents	Organization
Center for Cooperative Research	US foreign policy human rights	Commentary with links	topics, subtopics, "timelines"
Failure Is Impossible	domestic politics, mostly related to George W. Bush's administration	Links to online newspaper and magazine articles	Topic hierarchy
Foreign Policy In Focus	US foreign policy and related	original articles	content grouped by topic and separately by world region; hierarchies are shallow
Government Information Awareness	individuals and organizations in or related to the US Government		organizational hierarchies and search engine
The Memory Hole	Wide range, largely directed at people and organizations with power	excerpts of archival material (articles, memos, testimony)	various, including topical and title indexes
NameBase	Wide range, largely directed at people and organizations with power	commentaries, archival material, database of names and organizations	topic index, name search, extensive bibliography
The National Priorities Project	US government budget allocation	customized reports on federal spending	reports on federal spending generated dynamically from database, based on topic and US state
NewsFollowUp.com	domestic and foreign policy	mainly links to sites	topic hierarchy
nationalissues.com	issues of national political interest	Introductory discussion with tabular pros and cons; entire copies of articles publishes elsewhere (overview articles, as well as articles on both sides of a debate); hierarchical lists of links	topic hierarchy
Politics1	electoral and domestic politics	mainly links to sites	shallow topic hierarchy
publicagenda.org	issues of national political interest	For each issue, background facts and data are presented; comparisons are made of the different positions commonly taken; and contact information of relevant advocacy groups is provided.	shallow topic hierarchy
t r u t h o u t	variety of topics	mainly copies of press releases by legislative and other figures of authority	shallow topic hierarchy

Comments

• "Shallow" (in "shallow topic hierarchy") is not intended to denigrate, but rather simply indicate that the hierarchy has very few levels, perhaps only one.
• Center for Cooperative Research: This site has the most interesting organization. The "timelines" organize text and weblinks for an issue or topic (like events and information related to September 11) along a time axis. Most importantly, the site discusses inefficiencies in the presentation of information relevant to politics and public policy:

  If an activist wants to be well-informed about a current issue so he or she is better equipped to confront the uninformed public, that person will need to collect and read several different articles in order to get a full understanding of the topic. This is because the only tangible form of the current historical record is fragmented. It exists only in the various unsynthesized and often contradictory articles, transcripts, and reports that are published on a daily basis. Nowhere does the current historical record exist in just one synthesized and coherent whole.

  These points are very similar to those made in this website's mission statement. The Center for Cooperative Research's outline on the "forged Niger documents" is an outstanding example of the value of compiling annotated bibliographies of otherwise scattered information.
• Failure Is Impossible: See the topic index and site index for a noteworthy organization of political and current event information by topic.
• NameBase: Much of the data of this site comes from proper names of individuals and organizations appearing in an extensive body of works. There are interesting comments on the name authority problem.
• nationalissues.com: Unclear how they paid for copyrighted content of others. This site seems to have a rightward bias, which would be acceptable but for the fact it appears to pretend otherwise (liberal sources are cited, but they are outnumbered by conservative sources).
• publicagenda.org: The information presented at this site is of uniformly high quality.

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Page last updated on 2004 February 15