When researching my topic of the Trump Trials, I knew I had to be very careful with what sources I was going to choose as anything with politics is going to contain bias towards one side or another. As a result, I spent the majority of my learning process researching actual facts and statistics and interpreting them in a wide view thinking of both sides rather than looking at what certain news sources were going to report on these impeachment trials. I also had to go and ensure that multiple sources were reporting information that I was going to report to make sure it wasn’t made up or heavily biased. For how I found these sources, I tried to use google scholar to find my information, but had a hard time finding much other than basic background information on these trials so I went to a normal google search and tried to stay with government websites. For my Tier 1 source, I used google scholar and looked up “Trump Impeachments” and found an article that detailed a lot of historical facts about the impeachment trials for Trump. I found this source to be reliable due to the fact that it cited many different sources for its information, meaning that it took a wide range of sources and viewpoints helping make sure the content was reliable and lacking as much bias as possible. However, google scholar wasn’t able to provide me with a lot of information, so for the rest of my sources I had to go to normal google and search broad terms such as “Trump impeachments”, “Trump public opinion”, “Andrew Jackson impeachment”, and “Bill Clinton Impeachment” to avoid playing into any specific bias. With these searches, I was able to find a CBS article providing up to date information on the Trump trials. At first I was scared of using this source, as they are known to lean left, however I was able to find that this specific article was solely producing facts about the trials and did not attempt to sway how the reader interpreted them so I decided to use them. I then found a Gallup News article that was providing statistics on how much Trump was liked over time, and since it was statistics and not opinions I decided to use them. I needed some more facts to pair with these statistics so I found an article posted by a UVA professor, along with other authors to improve validity, to help me understand more about how Trump was viewed by people before the trials. Next when researching Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton, I found a VOA news article, which is a news source that is usually reliable for being unbiased, and then verified that its news was consistent with other sources before using it. Finally for Bill Clinton, I found a CNN article which once again made me concerned due to the left nature of CNN, but I was able to see that it was mainly using facts not opinions, and paired it with a .gov news source that I found to ensure quality information. Overall, I was expecting news sources to be much more biased than they were when researching these topics. Granted some of the news sources that I came across were much more defending of or aggressive towards these presidents actions depending on whether they were known to be more left or right biased, but overall some of the more well known news sources seemed to be reporting more facts rather than analysis on their online articles than I was expecting.
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