How reliable are your sources?

I’ve been chewing on something lately regarding how we handle sources here—specifically how the mods deal with them... because, honestly, I’ve lost count of how many times I've seen political threads get nuked just because someone linked to sites like CNN, Fox News, or similar outlets, or even worse, had their entire post wiped for citing them as a primary source. It seems like whenever the topic shifts to immigration, the hammer comes down hard on anyone pulling info from those sketchy, bottom-of-the-barrel websites that end up being totally wrong anyway.

So, what’s the official word from the mod team on sites like Breitbart, InfoWars, or those other fringe bloggy types? Are they considered legitimate sources in this community, or are they officially lumped into that whole "fake news" category everyone loves to throw around these days? I’m asking because there’s this one guy in a politics thread who keeps and keeps citing these exact kinds of sites, and it makes me wonder—what’s the actual stance here? Can the stuff found on a site like that actually be used as a solid, verified argument in a debate, or is it all just noise?

Thanks.

Joseph Stewart38 said:...who just pull from these totally sketchy, bottom-of-the-barrel websites where the stories almost always turn out to be complete garbage.

There you go. You basically answered your own question. 😉

To be honest, I can't really open those ones you're asking about because I don't follow one of them at all, and I haven't run into any links from that other site on the subreddits I moderate... and as for the second one, I've never even heard of it. If you think linking to stuff from those sites is just nonsense, well, that's usually pretty easy to prove, much like how easy it was to figure out that everything on those other boards you mentioned was total garbage...

I have to admit, I wasn't lucky enough to get slapped with a warning for using an "unreliable source."
But I get the feeling that if outlets like nytimes.com are totally fine, then it’s pretty ridiculous to act like any other source is somehow untrustworthy.