After reading John R. Henderson’s tutorial I have decided to look at a view websites and will attempt to show why they make be reliable or not. First, I have decided to write about a blog on The Huffington Post about Pedophilia and Star Trek. The absurdness of the topic should be a dead giveaway that this is going to be unreliable. I’m not just saying that because I’m a Star Trek fan and not a pedophile but the very topic is ridiculous.
This blog has two problems stemming from web browser links. Firstly, the LA Times article that this blog was based on had no mention of Star Trek whatsoever. The blogger calls the statistic to be mind boggling, but there is no statistic to be found at all. What is truly mind boggling is how a site with a good reputation like the Huffington Post would allow such a glaring mistake not to be corrected or the post completely deleted all together. With this fact, I am uncertain if the quotes that are in this blog are accurate or if they have been invented by somebody who wants to insult Star Trek. I know some people don’t like it, but this person seems to have a vendetta against Star Trek and its group of fans called Trekkers. This brings up another mistake by the blogger who incorrectly names Star Trek fans as “trekkies.” This glaring mistake shows, at least to me that she doesn’t know what she is talking about. Another web link mistake is a broken link which supposedly has an article that refutes her standpoint that Star Trek fans are more likely then not to be engaging in deviant sexual behavior with children. I would have really liked to have read that other blog, but I cannot. The link does not work, and it says ‘forbidden’ when I try to access it. This might be a problem that the other blogger needs to take care of but she could post the other bloggers opinion herself. Later in this essay I will describe what I found out when I searched this bloggers name into a search engine. Hopefully my web search will give me some insight on why Ladowsky thinks she is an expert on deviant behavior or “Star Trek.”
This particular post is the only blog that she ever did on the Huffington Post’s website. This is very odd, and could be a sign that her work was not up to scratch with the experts that makes the Huffington Post so respected. There could be other reasons for this being her own post, but it is intriguing and leads to questions on to why this was her only post on the website.
There are a few grammatical errors and some mistakes of television writing. Firstly, the blog does not have quotation marks on the names of the episodes of “Star Trek” that she brings up. Also, it would also be appropriate for her to put quotation marks over the words “Star Trek” itself. These oversights are important because people who are not familiar of the show will not know what she is talking about. Quotation marks are necessary to distinguish the episode of “Star Trek” with the other words in this blog. Grammatically there are a few commas that Microsoft word says that a semi-colon would work better in the sentence. Also, the blog contains a sentence fragment. These small mistakes might be easy to ignore, but added with everything else I think that they cannot.
There is one other technical aspect to why I would not trust this blog, and it is because of a lack of comments. This could be explained in a few different ways all of them not good for the blogs’ credibility. Firstly, there could simply been no readers to this blog or whoever read the blog did not care enough about the topic to post. Secondly, there could have been posts to this blog that were deleted because they were negatively blasting the blogs topic matter. Since the internet has a lot of “Star Trek” fans I am sure this article would anger everybody who read the article. Thirdly, the blogger might have been scared of the comments that she would get, and immediately closed the blog from accepting messages. These are the three, as Spock would call logical reasons why the blog does not have any posts. All three of these reasons are sufficient to question the validity of this bloggers claim.
The Huffington Post did have a very small biography on Ladowsky on their webpage. It says that she is a “doctoral candidate in clinical psychology and a Psychology intern at a Los Angeles Clinic.” It also says that she appeared as a relationship expert on a television show called Rendezvous. It also says that some of her articles have appeared in such papers as “The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Mirabella and In Style.” So, it appears her psychological and journalistic credentials are in order. The other mistakes in the blog are still there and I still believe the blog was a waste of time to write. The article offers no news, and in my opinion is not very interesting. Why would anybody want to read this, what does it offer? I think it offers nothing of value, and I certainly only read it in order to be fully able to insult it in this essay. The only fact that matters to me is that the LA Times article she based her entire blog on has no mention of “Star Trek.” This to me shows that she must have some vendetta on the show, maybe she wasn’t a fan growing up. Maybe she tried for a part on the show and was turned down. She invented the idea that the LA Times article mentioned Star Trek and only she knows why.
Google search brought up that Ladowsky co-wrote a book called “How to Dump a Guy” and that she wrote a biography on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. What I can note about the book is that it is not in print anymore, and amazon.com members are sell it for a minimum of fifty five cents. That is the price of a used copy and they sell a new copy for $1.98! Also, a Google search brought up a piece like this one: a piece that completely refutes what is said. That article can be found at this URL: http://www.conservativecat.com/mt/archives/2005/08/ellen_ladowski.html. The LA times article that Ladowsky used must have been somewhere at one point because the poster shows how Ladowsky misquoted it.
The Ladowsky quote is “The LA Times recently ran a story about the Child Exploitation Section of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit, which contained a mind-boggling statistic: of the more than 100 offenders the unit has arrested over the last four years, "all but one" has been "a hard-core Trekkie."
The real LA Times Quote: “We always say there are two types of pedophiles: Star Trek and Star Wars. But it's mostly Star Trek.”
Ladowsky uses the quote marks to make us believe that a person said what she wrote verbatim. The words “all but one” and “a hardcore trekkie” were in quotes. There is no such quote, and it was journalistically dishonest for Ladowsky to pretend that there was. This is just another reason to not believe the content of the blog, and another reason why Ladowsky should probably go to journalism school along with her training to be a psychologist.
When looking for information on “Star Trek”, I usually go to www.startrek.com. I trust that site because it is known as the official website of the television show and movie series. The site is maintained by CBS/Paramount who own “Star Trek.” I usually try to get most of my information from official sources. I usually do not trust information from websites when I see a tilde sign because I know that is a definitive sign that the website is someone’s personal website. I didn’t see that on the tutorial, but it is something that I already knew about web pages. You always need to know who runs a website and what their objective in running it is. The objective of the “Star Trek” website is to give information about the show to its readers and to keep them informed of developments of future film or television ventures. The objective of this is simple: the website exists to make sure people buy, or watch Star Trek episodes, movies and merchandise. At least they are honest about it, and the website is well run and maintained. I don’t know why Ladowsky wrote her blog, and that is one of the main reason I was uneasy about it. Along with misquotes and everything else the ultimate question was not answered: why would I want to read this? I wouldn’t want to read it, and I don’t know anybody else who would either.
-Ryan Damon
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