Monday, March 7, 2011

www.prisonplanet.com

Credibility Assignment - www.prisonplanet.com

Prisonplanet.com is a website produced by Alex Jones, who is a radio personality/conspiracy theorist. Sometimes I like to read his website, just to get another view of what's going on in the world - although everything he says has to be taken with an extreme grain of salt. His website, at first glance, is well put together... I think, but I'll run the checklist by it and see how he fairs!
Content:
The page is not under construction, and is updated daily. The title of the page is Alex Jones' Prison Planet.com. The audience is conspiracy theorists, and there is an obvious bias to the information. Alex Jones does not trust our government at all, and he doesn't want you to either. All the links on his site work for the most part, although I can recall looking at this in the past and finding a dead link or two. There are links to external stories, interviews, and other websites. The outside sources only support the information he wants you to see, although some sources are eerily reliable.
Authority:
Alex Jones created the page, and he is just a radio host. There are means to contact the author. There are his, his contributing writers, editors, associate editors, and staff writers names on the website, as well as a phone number, email address, and mailing address to reach them at. There are also discussion forums and places to discuss. The site is run by advertising, I believe. Lots of advertisements for survival equipment, end-of-the-world products, and of corse, Alex Jones/Prison Planet products, shirts, stuff. The domain name is .com, so Alex purchased it. You can't backtrack the URL because it's pretty short as it is. The site seems accurate, but again, just incredibly biased.
Presentation:
The site is pretty professional looking, if one didn't know nay better they would think this was a legitimate news site. I found no GSP errors upon viewing the site this time, but I seem to remember having found some in the past, just from the contributing writers. There is appropriate and well-placed headlines and navigation, and I like how much multimedia there is on the website. All images and sound works that I've found, although there is so much I didn't have time to check it all. I found the site because I have friends that read it regularly, if you search Alex Jones or Infowars or Prison Planet its the first thing to come up. News, editorial, and advertisements sit side by side on the website (is that what you were asking?) Source code looks kind of complicated, there's a lot going on on the site, after all.
Overall, I was pretty impressed by Alex Jones website, it seems as legit as a conspiracy theory website can be.

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