Unrestricted Web Publishing

I reviewed an online news article posted by The Huffington Post. The headline read, “Sallie Mae Cheated Soldiers on Federal Student Loans, Government Investigators Find.” I immediately zoned into two words, “cheated and find,” and thought I would delve deeper by evaluating the credibility of this story based on guidelines set in the document, Criteria to Evaluate the Credibility of WWW Resources.

In determining whether there was a potential impact of unrestricted web publishing through mass media as it relates to the above mentioned article, following is what I found.  The author, Shahien Nasiripour has some authority in the field in which he has reported. He is Chief Financial and Regulatory Correspondent for The Huffington Post, where he covers financial regulation, large financial groups, Wall Street, Washington policy and the ongoing global response to the financial crisis. Previously, he was Financial and Regulatory Correspondent for the Financial Times. Prior to that, he was Senior Business Reporter for the Huffington Post, having first joined the publication in 2009, in addition to Reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting, Researcher for ESPN, and Reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and The Providence Journal. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California. He can be reached at shahien@huffingtonpost.com, via Skype, Twitter and Facebook.

The author, Nasiripour, has no peer reviewed publications, on the web or in hard copy. There are no clues in this article that the author is being biased, as he appears to be referring to primary and secondary sources, all fact based. Each web link of information is current and there are a series of related articles posted on the author’s page in date order. The author’s work is cited in the article via inserted hyperlinks, which reference credible, authoritative sources. The article is fully covered with both WWW and hyperlinked print sources to provide balance. The article appears on a news and journalistic web site; www.huffingtonpost.com, and in deconstructing the web address, there is evidence linked back to the title of story, as well as key words from which to further research credibility i.e., “service members and Sallie Mae.”