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.
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.
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.
Those comments sound great. Why are they an issue? Many if the best comments are basically data not personal point of view
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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
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
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.
