It pops up all the time, it’s a waste of time and I’m sure it has been used countless of times to discard some piece of information. It doesn’t add up anything productive to the comments, people who comment don’t even say anything they actually think they just “did you know that MBFC says this so it has to be truth?” I could go on but I think you get the idea.
The liberals who fancy that .ml is oppressing them are already so annoying and this would give them another thing to make constant complaints about. I think we should just have a bot response tagged on to comments that link to the site.
But muh Media Bias/Fact Check says it checks out!
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/contact/
Dave M. Van Zandt obtained a Communications Degree before pursuing a higher degree in the sciences. Dave currently works full time in the health care industry. Dave has spent more than 20 years as an arm chair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence.
Van Zandt is some hobbyist who was in the right place at the right time: the “post-truth” moment of Clinton’s loss to Trump and the string of Russiagate conspiracy theories and Kellyanne Conway’s alternative facts and the Cambridge Analytica hysteria.
The whole concept of the “left” or ”right“ “bias” being inversely correlated with factualness is garbage. These kinds of graphs, which try to convince us that centrism equals factualness, are garbage:
The core bias of corporate media is the bias of the capitalist class, but people like Van Zandt don’t seem to understand this.
The inner workings of corporate media were explained about forty years ago in Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent.
A five minute introduction: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
I said “these kinds of graphs,” of which there are many https://duckduckgo.com/?q=media+bias+chart&iax=images&ia=images
But you’ve sparked an idea for an interesting project: use MBFC’s API to create one of these graphs from their own data. Doing a little googling, it seems that scripts and data dumps aren’t hard to come by.
I think armchair media analyst Dave M. Van Zandt is going on vibes. I don’t think he understands corporate & think tank media. Does he know who Walter Lippman or Edward Bernays were, or what the Council on Foreign Relations (“least biased” 🤡) is or made note of its prominent media members? Does he know about the Powell memorandum or the Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy?
No results found for
site:mediabiasfactcheck.com "manufacturing consent".I’ve seen The Grayzone debunk the New York Times’ lies many times, and yet:
Also, in what universe is the neoliberal, anti-labor NYT center-left? And if the Grayzone in the ultraviolet territory, where does that leave the explicitly Communist Monthly Review, outside of MBFC’s Overton window? Surprise, it’s to the right of it:
The first step is to understand the media, which Media Bias/Fact Check and the Ad Fontes Media* are never going to teach you. The only people who are taught it are those who get degrees in marketing, public relations, political science, history, and journalism; and even then only some of them.
The new post-Trump/“post-truth” media literacy curricula won’t teach it to you either, because it was paid for and crafted by the US military-industrial complex: New Media Literacy Standards Aim to Combat ‘Truth Decay’.
This week, the RAND Corporation released a new set of media literacy standards designed to support schools in this task.
The standards are part of RAND’s ongoing project on “truth decay”: a phenomenon that RAND researchers describe as “the diminishing role that facts, data, and analysis play in our political and civic discourse.”
None of it is a secret, though, and it can be learned.
All of these supposedly left leaning news headlines… Mamdani sworn in, can they keep up the momentum?
lol… these charts completely exclude where these organizations stand economically.
We need a wealth tax to end billionaires. I’m so tired of these completely false narratives. American politics are basically all at least right or center right.
On the world stage even someone like Bernie Sanders is barely left of center. Americans think Walter Kronkite is a communist and it’s fucking stupid because we live in an oligarchy controlled by billionaire media organizations.
On a world stage Sanders is the left wing of the nazi eagle
lol… dang you did Bernie wrong, bro
Nah, he does it to himself. We all saw him during the genocide
Are you in the states? Is there no politician that you support? I get it, I was a little disappointed Bernie didn’t speak out sooner than he did myself, but I still like %99.9 of the legislation and policies he supports.
Edit: Bernie is also Jewish. I’m sure he is heart broken about what’s happening in Gaza, and Israel. He wrote or sponsored legislation to cut funding for offensive weapons from USA to Israel if I’m not mistaken.
Earlier than most. Can we blame the folks who voted against these bills that Bernie was actually able to get important public votes for, to show which donors or constituents they are representing?
Referring to the vote on the offensive weapons funding, but I don’t know which way you’d have to have voted I can’t remember the wording of the bills just used this one as an example.
But Bernie actually may have forced a few votes in to get a public record of where our politicians representing our country stand and how they vote on these issues.You stand your butt up senate subcommittee meeting
Sounds good
fwiw I would be in support of this. It’s normal for forums to have rules against low-quality discussion.
Mbfc is just a score of how aligned with the empire propaganda machine an outlet is, nothing more. People who take it seriously should not be taken seriously themselves. If you need a site to tell you what kind of information you are able to see, regardless of you agreeing with the info or not, you should not be giving opinions online
Should have a standardised response to MBFC getting posted, like the one Davel posted.
I don’t think a bot is worth for that, no one will read it anyway, just delete the comments.
I think there is some value to MBFC, even though there are also cases where it is problematic - I don’t think a blanket rule would be right.
The issues (& mitigating factors):
- Some of the ‘mostly analytics’ sources still have ‘bias by omission’ problems or misleading headlines, even if the facts in the articles are accurate. But I think on the fediverse, we aren’t beholden to algorithms or their editorial choices in terms of the balance of what we see, so the impact of this is limited.
- Opinion pieces have a place, although arguably not on World News. At the very least, factual pieces from outlets that also publish opinion have a place. But MBFC downrates outlets for having an opinion at all even when clearly labelled as such.
- The attempt to categorise every bias on a left to right scale when really there are so many dimensions any bias could be along isn’t as helpful.
So I’d suggest:
- Only mentioning it when an outlet has a history of publishing things that are factually incorrect (or there is reasonable doubt over it). Not every fact can be verified from first principles (and sadly often articles don’t name their primary sources - in a better world having no source would reduce credibility, but it is often hard to find articles that meet the well-sourced bar). People deliberately muddying the waters create think-tanks to cite with fake facts, fake scientific journals, and cite other unreliable sources - fact checking often requires on the ground investigation, asking reliable experts, and so on; it is simply impossible to be in expert in everything you read in the news to spot well-executed fake news. I think of the approach like a tree - there are experts in an area who can genuinely apply critical analysis to decide if something is fact or bogus. But there are also bogus experts. Then there are aggregators of facts (journals and think-tanks, etc…) that try to only accept things reviewed by genuine experts. But there are also bogus aggregators. Then there are journalists and outlets that further collect things from genuine aggregators and experts, and refine them. But there are also bogus outlets. Sites like MBFC try to act like a root to the tree and help you identify the truthful outlets, who have a good record of relying on truthful aggregators, who rely on truthful experts.
- The left / right bias part means very little - I’d suggest ignoring it if you’re looking at a single article.
- Any of the higher tiers of factual reporting should be fine and not worth a mention.
If there are reliable sources countering some facts, posting those instead of (or as well as) complaining about the source is probably better.
Only mentioning it when an outlet has a history of publishing things that are factually incorrect
Then comment saying that about said news outlet, no one is going to ban liberals because they’re saying RT is Russian propaganda or whatever, but relying on MBFC as some sort of paragon of truth is actually harmful.
Can you post a few real examples? Not sure I fully understand what youre aiming at.
Right now it sounds like youre trying to impliment censorship.
https://lemmy.ml/post/41019382/23036391
This happens every few days, all the time. Low effort comment with no scientific back up. Yes, I am trying to censor the neoliberal outlook from being presented as reality in this community.
Neoliberals can suck it
Oh yea that sounds like AI propaganda bullshit.
Thanks for sharing, I havent actually seen any of these yet but would support a ban.
AFAIK most posts have a single source news disclaimer and stuff like that anyway so its redundant to begin with.
That was my exact thought, it reads like AI, even tho I’m sure the person who commented did so in their full good will. Everyone could say some news outlet is propaganda, and they are right, most news outlets are sponsored by whatever government their company resides.
Those comments sound great. Why are they an issue? Many if the best comments are basically data not personal point of view
MBFC is like 100% vibes masquarading as actual data. If we had some objective measure of a news source, I would welcome it, but that’s a fantasy.
Yeah, it’s a tough problem to solve but I don’t think for it’s a terrible source for getting a feel when someone drops a link from an institution you’ve never heard of. No one really has the time to fact check every article or explore every institution. Agreed the website, and concept, has more than a few flaws
If you find it especially helpful to know what centrist liberals think of a source, then sure, but the fact is that people talk about it like it’s “basically data and not a personal point of view” (not necessarily saying you do) which is catastrophically false.
I hadn’t seen these people (but now have seen it a couple of times) and you have to start somewhere. At its core, it’s just a comment someone is making. It really interesting seeing this group so favourable to banning or setting up an auto-reply
No one really has the time to fact check every article or explore every institution.
Way to admit that you let yourself to be propagandized. You should always read news critically. It’s easier to assume that everything is trying to push something, than to rely on a fancy graph some random dipshit on the internet created and then read it uncritically
What a way to admit you’re not realistic about the amount of time you have and how long things take
I never said I didn’t read things critically. That not fact checking which takes time beyond noticing bias and logical issues
What a way to admit you’re not realistic about the amount of time you have and how long things take
I never said I didn’t read things critically.
The contradiction is so glaring that I’m not sure if you read what you write as you heavily imply it
You don’t need to trust the institution, you need to read the article and use brain power to differentiate “propaganda” from actual information. You won’t be able to do much reading the headline, it doesn’t matter if it comes straight out of Putin’s ass hole or from Biden’s dick.
From half of these comments I’m not seeing a lot of brain power used to avoid propaganda and just a lot of people buying into it
If it just ranked an outlets political opinion as left, right or center: no one would really be upset. It’s their effort to rank by credibility, and labeling centrisim as “unbiased” is fundamentally asinine; not “a few flaws”.
There are definitely more axis that could be added but the center isn’t unbiased. The left and right tend to be pretty biased. Plenty in the center is too. Where are you seeing the center labeled as unbiased?
The word “center” implies that it’s less biased/unbiased to the majority of people. It’s what average people see as a “safe” source and allows them to read it uncritically. Media literacy is not as widespread as you think it as, as demonstrated with your handling of this subject. Why are you so obtuse about it?
You can make much sharper criticism than that, because MBFC at sometimes suggests and other times says outright that the center is the least biased (see davel’s comment).
The idea that something is not biased based on the fact that “it shouldn’t be neither too lefty nor too righty” is absurd, it has a bias for “centrists” who believe they live on the fence but then you hear them speak they are rightists. I could go on, it’s basically trash, low effort strawman to discredit possible factual information.
I see you don’t let emotion cloud your judgements…
Signed a disgusting centerist
No emotion here, I just like to use to use dysphemisms.
The fact that you think its a good idea shows that you believe, even if you are not aware, that your positions are neutral when they’re not. If you are not investigating your own bias why should we bother with comments telling you what is or isn’t biased? All that’s signaling to you is if something is “good” or “bad” because your position is “good” and not biased at all.
I, and others with my perspective, understand that everything has a bias, and you need to be able to read something critically to find that bias. These bias checking sites are not doing that, they are only looking to ensure people who share your view, the natural or default perspective, or the neoliberal perspective, do not read the “wrong” content.
Interesting comment
I have my biases, and I struggle reading most news sources because of theirs. Reading critically is very important and fact checks can help educate people on how to do that. Hopefully without picking up their biases.
So, people should waste time reading a source just because someone has a lot of energy flooding the zone so they can see what the real biases are?
Nothing you’ve said helps justify why adding more information is worse. People can still do your reading critically thing as well
I’m getting more suspicious of you after this emotional plea. What sorts sources are you upset have these comments, do you have some examples?
Nothing you’ve said helps justify why adding more information is worse
Because the additional information holds some random dipshits opinion on what is trustworthy and what not. When you see the “additional information” to show that something is trustworthy you read it uncritically
Oh wow. You believe trustworthy means you shouldn’t read something uncritically? What an interesting world you live in
Trustworthy by whose standards?
From Marx’s The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas … The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”
You can’t just say “You believe trustworthy means you shouldn’t read something uncritically” when we are LITERALLY talking about what the nature of TRUST and FACT even is, and where people and institutions get their AUTHORITY from.
This is what I mean! You can’t even imagine a situation where a “media bias” site Isn’t BIASED and doesn’t skew their results based on that bias, resulting in the “additional information” CONTRIBUTING TO BIAS.
They all have bias and yet ARE THE ARBITER’S OF BIAS. Do you understand the contradiction now? They do nothing to help a person to be critical because they launder their authority, which is given to them by the uncritical masses, to distribute their bourgeois bias under the guise of neutrality!
the uncritical masses
There is a sense in which this is a correct statement, but I think simply saying this when talking to a liberal is unhelpful because it does not make apparent that this behavior of being “uncritical” isn’t the masses being “sheeple” (scare quotes, not quoting you), but them choosing to accept what affirms their ideology.
Yeah I struggled to find another way to phrase it, because even the idea of being critical is highly dependent on your perspective. You have to have a level of skepticism I think to even begin to be critical. Liberalism is constantly working to ensure that you never become skeptical of its own institutions or ideas. Deeply uncurious might be a more accurate way to say it, or passive consumers of media. The whole phenomenon of fact checking and media bias is rooted in things like Russiagate and Covid misinformation.
This idea of objective truth or empirical truth as applied to factuality in media attempts to collapse the realm of what is possible or to narrow the scope of reality. Its attached to liberal obsession with institutions and ideas and their infallibility. Take the the Washington Post. Media Bias Fact Check says it has a LEFT-CENTER BIAS. Meanwhile, you have Jeff Bazos preventing them from endorsing a candidate and then saying their opinion pages will “defend free market and ‘personal liberties’”. But liberals will not recall that, they’ve probably forgotten these things even happened. To them WaPo isn’t a conservative rag so its good. Even the idea of what is Left is part of the ruling ideas. Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Anarchism, are all regulated to fringe status, deeply equated with fascism to dilute their character, with the goal of excluding them from the “Left” category, which is how you arrive at “LEFT-CENTER BIAS”.
You can’t even imagine a situation where a “media bias” site Isn’t BIASED
This is my default position, that it is biased. All of your comments are doing an amazing job of projecting some views you’ve decided I believe onto me. And being pretty longwinded to try to make a point
Yes i believe the majority of people that assume something is declared trustworthy read it uncritically. If you read my other comment it’s easier to assume everything is not trustworthy, so it forces you to read it critically. What an naive world you live in to not see this
your reading critically thing
I don’t think the obvious insinuation is fair to you, but I want to point out that this is an extremely funny turn of phrase.
I’m getting more suspicious of you after this emotional plea. What sorts sources are you upset have these comments
Speaking of unfair, I don’t think this comment is either. Calling that comment an “emotional plea” worth raising your suspicions is absurd. There’s not even that much of an emotional affectation and certainly there is no appeal to emotion in place of a valid argument. What is “emotional”? That you can infer he has a feeling on the subject? Come on. Furthermore, RedWizard is an upstanding guy from everything I’ve seen of him, and I think it’s just that some of us are really sick of MBFC tacitly question-begging the center being unbiased and people in some spaces always using it to attack anything source left of CNN, a behavior we’ve watched or been subjected to for several years now.
Trying to explain it in terms of how you frame things: You are right when you said elsewhere that people only have so much time to read through various sources, so polluting the space with something that has been long established to be bullshit is detrimental to having more people come to more reasonable conclusions, and this is something that I’m sure you would agree to if it was a source that you really accepted at least that level of criticism for (e.g. it would be a negative for the site to get a deluge of links to flat Earth websites). That is why “adding more information is worse.” If it’s about putting something in an archive, then by all means put whatever you like in the archive so we have it for reference, but for these sorts of fleeting discussions, it is obviously harmful.
To be clear though, I don’t support banning it on the basis that the liberals who fancy that .ml is oppressing them are already so annoying and this would give them another thing to make constant complaints about. I think we should just have a bot response tagged on to comments that link to the site.
Edit: RW does make more emotional comments elsewhere, but again not appealing to emotion, so I don’t think the criticism rises above the most absurd of tone-policing.
I’m sure you would agree to if it was a source that you really accepted at least that level of criticism for (e.g. it would be a negative for the site to get a deluge of links to flat Earth websites). That is why “adding more information is worse.”
Fair. I think I say something similar in my “lemmy.ml” post that was a bit harsh / blunt: I get why this community wouldn’t like media bias. I didn’t expand to say that the spectrum they view the world through (I’m painting with a broad brush here and assuming how capitalist something is) isn’t in the media bias website and a bunch of sources they trust are flagged as unreasonable. I also say its not a community I particularly enjoy so I’ll be off
Calling that comment an “emotional plea” worth raising your suspicions is absurd.
Yeah, emotional was the wrong word although, like your edit gets at, it might apply to later comments. I’m about to leave the conversation but something like a preaching continued push might be closer. I’m lazy to reread the thread properly, I’m sure I have enough faults in it too
But, the raising suspicions is fair. It was a continued push of someone towards a viewpoint, very quick to presume my views, on recycled arguments and that is usually for me pretty suspicious
So between your initial, completely spurious accusation, this:
a preaching continued push
Which might otherwise be called a “campaign” or just “something this person believes in and argues for”
recycled arguments
Which, without proper refutation (and you have no proper refutation, see how you replied to me ~four times but could never give me a defense of the site), might just be “a reasonable argument that people repeat because it’s reasonable and has yet to be refuted” and similarly, in one of your other replies:
It really interesting seeing this group so favourable to banning or setting up an auto-reply
Which, again, could simply be that many of us have years of experience or Redditors/Ledditors posting that stupid website as an argument and you’d probably say the same thing if it was a website that supported flat earth theory, which is literally no less ridiculous than the claim that its individual ratings are based on, that being centrist is inherently less biased (which it literally does, see davel’s comment).
All this taken together is hard to read as anything other than you posing yourself as some intellectually rigorous figure that looks down upon the cult/herd that you see here, but in reality you have been clambering for literally any excuse you can find to discount arguments out of hand, to say that what I and others say simply “doesn’t count,” to avoid actually taking the arguments on their own merits. Despite your meaningless and sometimes wildly inaccurate complaints about emotionality, you certainly aren’t shy about your own affectation, as in where you said something like:
Signed, a disgusting centrist
So, self-victimizing aside, this absurd standard about emotionality is clearly not something that you actually believe in, it’s just a crass rhetorical cudgel that you use to defend your biases about this sort of media from being fact-checked. If only we had a website that dealt with that subject . . .
I don’t think the obvious insinuation is fair to you, but I want to point out that this is an extremely funny turn of phrase.
As in “You can read critically but for me, fuck that” is pretty funny to interject into this conversation? I almost edited it to be clearer and closer to “People can and do still read critically, you know that set of words people seem to be latching onto with questionable usage”
Ooooh. This is lemmy.ml, oops. I deleted ask anything from here since this group was tiring. But now I can guess why people are upset about the comment even though no one took the time to answer and give a few examples… they just took time to say how upsetting the site was
Everyone replied to you in more than one way and there are at least 4 or 5 examples of people doing these lazy strawmen. You’re the one who, as you showed, doesn’t bother reading or thinking critically. Imagine being offended because I oppose using some rando’s POV on news as factual evidence.
I propose you a brain game. I will create my own media bias fact fuck, and everything that’s not lefty is considered biased.
at least 4 or 5 examples of people doing these lazy strawmen.
I missed these. Where were the links to past comments? Or are you counting generic arguments, because those don’t paint a very clear picture so I didn’t count them. And they seemed very much like the same argument with different words: for some reason they imply sources in towards the centre of the political spectrum are without bias and for some reason that means people don’t read them critically when this is pointed out.
I will create my own media bias fact fuck, and everything that’s not lefty is considered biased.
I get that from what I guess your views are but it’s also not particularly equivalent. Especially for the US media landscape and for better or worse a lot of these checks seem to have their roots there.
The second link is exactly what I was after. Thanks.
Am I misunderstanding the first just after waking up? It seems to be a summary that points to this comment as its example:
https://lemmy.ml/comment/8913172
And that seems to be someone referencing the site while dripping with sarcasm and seems to be making the case that the OP is.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/un-watch/
Now go read the UNwatch website.
UN Watch utilizes credible sources such as the New York Times, Reuters, and usun.state.gov; however, they also utilize factually Questionable sources such as Cnsnews and the Daily Wire. Story selection mostly favors Israel and holds the same positions as the former right-wing government of Israel.
Wild how it gets to avoid being classified as propaganda by mbfc.
You’re going to have to spell out the point you attempted to make
Go back to bed grandpa, your brain is leaking.
