El Pais is a brand of PRISA, an advertising and media conglomerate with headquarters in Madrid, Spain.
Admin at Slrpnk.net
Pronouns: they/he
The Five Filters of the Propaganda Model
Admins PM me for access to Fedi Admin Guild Loomio
El Pais is a brand of PRISA, an advertising and media conglomerate with headquarters in Madrid, Spain.
Fuck the Heritage Foundation.
Threads.net federation status on major Lemmy instances:
Also, in memoriam:
I really like this short video (4:43) that Amy Goodman, main host of Democracy Now!, narrated about why flak organizations like MBFC are dangerous to democracy.
The !news team has recently changed course and opted out of the bot. AFAIK it will still operate in !world and !politics, but I want to share the news and thank everyone who has given feedback, downvoted, and protested the bot. This isn’t over, but I feel we’ve reached an inflection point.
Dave M. Van Zandt rates Al Jazeera English as “Credibility: Medium” and “Factual Reporting: Mixed”; this is depite the news outlet being recognized worldwide as one of the best in the world.
On Dave’s page, he lists two stories out of the enormous corpus they’ve produced in the last five years as evidence of his biased assessment.
The real issue Dave has with Al Jazeera, as evidenced by his pattern of bad, unscientific, and arbitrary classifications of middle-eastern journalism, is that their journalists occasionally do investigative reporting critical of the Israeli government. He has repeated the indefensible opinion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.
Dave’s personal credibility gatekeeper site, MBFC, is a flak organization is to center corporate news that is favorable to power, and push voices critical of it to the periphery. This is the fourth filter of the Propaganda Model.
MBFC claiming CNN is Left-Center, when it is owned by conservative billionaire John Malone, one of the largest landlords in the world. An example of this right-wing bias is when they put an obvious Trump Supporter on their recent panel of ‘undecided voters’.
If you want to understand bias, learn the five filters of the propaganda model.
According to Parker Molloy from The New Republic, this isn’t “an isolated case of questionable representation in CNN’s voter panels. In fact, it appears to be part of a troubling pattern stretching back years.” She suggests it could be “a potential willingness to mislead viewers for the sake of compelling television.” - media ownership and their profit motive, and complicity of the media elite are the first and third filters of the propaganda model.
Amy Goodman, main host of Democracy Now!, narrated a great short about why flak organizations like MBFC are dangerous to democracy.
I’m quite certain if I ignored the warning, I would earn a ban. The difference isn’t between the World and ML mods, it’s between me trying to play nice with their inconsistent bullshit rules, and the people getting banned from ML not respecting the predictable bullshit rules of that instance.
It’s obviously more than a disagreement about how to define ‘spamming.’ The MBFC bot is now the most downvoted account in Lemmy history, and it is now more unpopular than the most popular Lemmy account is popular. It appears in every !news, !world, and !politics thread where it is experienced as spam by the vast majority of users.
But the harm it does is greater than merely taking up pagespace. It distorts the discussion in favor of MBFC’s author’s right-wing views, and gives the World mods the pretense of neutrality when removing left-wing voices from their communities. The MBFC has been widely discredited. For example, Wikipedia’s Reliable Sources Noticeboard rates sources as generally reliable (green), no consensus (yellow), mostly unreliable (red).
Giving this joke of a resource an institutional place in the flagship communities of the Lemmy’s largest instance are an embarrassment to the entire Threadiverse project. Due to WP’s policy of neutrality, it’s even more damning when you look under the hood and read the specific criticisms that lead its policy of not linking MBFC in its pages. I am being threatened by the mods for reposting excepts from those criticisms in reply to the MBFC bot spam.
If your criticism of the bot is too regular or too persuasive, the mods will call you a spammer.
The irony saying that while the World mods are actively censoring criticism.
Credit to Keeponstalin@lemmy.world for assembling all of these references from different journals in the post text.
MBFC uses non-partisan fact-checking institutions to bolster their credibility, while holding none of the standards. Then they use that laundered credibility to gatekeep minority and politically inconvenient voices.
It should be noted that despite no non-partisan fact checkers are listed on MBFC’s site as raising concerns about the The Cradle’s credibility, Dave M. Van Zandt has arbitrarily placed it in the “Factual Reporting: Mixed” and “Credibility: Medium” categories. One of the concerns he posits is The Cradle’s ‘lack of transparency,’ but the weird right-wing guy who decides these ratings also lacks any transparency himself in the method he used to come to that conclusion.
Fact checking should increase media literacy and identify bad actors that fabricate news, not justify the destruction of a diverse and healthy media environment.
Ask a socialist what’s wrong with Lemmy.world, they’ll give you a myriad of issues. Ask a capitalist what’s wrong with Lemmy.ml, they’ll describe Lemmy.world.
If you’d like to see it discussed elsewhere, you’re welcome to cross-post it.
This is part of culture clash between old social media culture and Fediverse norms. If moderators choose to censor this discussion as well, it’s only going to get bigger.
The MBFC is not any part of any solution, and failing to acknowledge how the bot is harming media literacy on Lemmy undermines any future solution you might implement.
I’ve posted twice in the thread in !politics@lemmy.world, as well as reached out to @Rooki@lemmy.world, and his responses reek of bad faith. I’ve posted in the pinned thread, but if it has come this far, then politely containing our discontent to the sanctioned channels is not enough.
It’s pretty hard to ignore the overwhelming downvotes the bot posts have attracted, and if someone sees that and still thinks MBFC is a good idea, I question their judgement. It’s likely they will ignore our well-thought out concerns as well.
My suggestion is to respond directly to the bot so that people observing the spectacle of downvotes have a better understanding of what is going on. We downvote MBFC because we are on the side of fact-checking and media literacy - not against it.
Dave Van Zandt’s site, Media Bias Fact Check puts The Guardian and Breitbart in the same (Factual Reporting: MIXED) category of credibility. Apparently this is because they both have articles where the facts are contested. This ignores the difference in size of the two news sources’ publication rate, the number of articles contested, and the seriousness and type of errors. Van Zandt is not a social scientist, and should not be running a credibility gatekeeper when he doesn’t understand statistics, science, or bias.
MBFC uses a fundamentally flawed methodology for categorizing bias. Lemmy.World loses credibility every day this bot continues to operate.
–Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent”