I know MediaBiasFactCheck is not a be-all-end-all to truth/bias in media, but I find it to be a useful resource.
It makes sense to downvote it in posts that have great discussion – let the content rise up so people can have discussions with humans, sure.
But sometimes I see it getting downvoted when it’s the only comment there. Which does nothing, unless a reader has rules that automatically hide downvoted comments (but a reader would be able to expand the comment anyways…so really no difference).
What’s the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there’s people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don’t see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck…
What’s the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there’s people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don’t see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck…
To express dissatisfaction.
There’s a lot of people that view the MBFC reports as themselves being biased, and to be fair, their process for generating the reports are opaque as fucking hell so we have no way to know how biased or not they are.
it’s also kinda spammy, and- IMO- not really all that useful.
Why do you say they’re opaque? They detail the history of the publication, the ownership, their analysis of bias within their reporting, and give examples of failed fact checks. I’m not sure what else you could want about how a publication is rated? I’m not saying it’s perfect, but they seem to be putting a solid effort into explaining how they arrive at the ratings they give.
Because their methodology is nothing but buzzwords:
The primary aim of our methodology is to systematically evaluate the ideological leanings and factual accuracy of media and information outlets. This is achieved through a multi-faceted approach that incorporates both quantitative metrics and qualitative assessments in accordance with our rigorously defined criteria.
Despite apparently having “rigorously defined criteria”, they don’t actually say what they are.
They literally publish their methodology and scoring system.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/
So they do say exactly what their criteria is, and how it is scored. None of that is buzz words, it’s just a summary that fit in a few sentences. You can look at the full methodology if you want more than just that small bullet description.
I’m not saying that you have to agree with their scoring, or that it is necessarily accurate. I just think if you’re going to critique a thing, you should at least know what you’re critiquing.
On each page, they describe, in detail, exactly how they come to their conclusions.
While you may disagree with what they have to say, to claim they’re hiding anything or that they aren’t being transparent or arbitrary is just untrue.
I lost all confidence in it when it rated Jerusalem Post and Euronews (associated with Viktor Orban) as “highly reliable”. Both push the pro-fascist narratives of their associated governments. It’s better to have no labeling than to label fascist propaganda as “highly reliable”
Any the branding of anything that is impartial as left center?? Like BBC News, Axios, Yahoo News, Sports Illustrated, left center??
And then the fucking economist which supported the UK conservatives not long ago and supported Bush is branded as left center
Same reason I don’t trust it - imagine rating fking BBC (the literal pro-state violence, austerity supporting, anti-immigration governmental mouth piece as “left-center”)
It just distorts people’s perception of what political biases are and makes them complacent by relying on an automated bot to do the important work of using your own judgment for what constitutes as moral or justified.
By letting it platform itself on lemmy, it’s basically inserting itself as the de facto expert on the topic - so for example, people overseas might see BBC rated as left-center and highly factual and start believing that wanting to “secure your borders” is a thing that UK leftist want. Well excuse me if I don’t want a privately owned (even if open source) US company deciding what political views others should have.
Fucking hell even Euronews is controlled by Orbán? Ffs there is truly no free media here other than RTL on TVs.
I downvoted then blocked it because:
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I don’t trust its specific analysis of sites. Others detail some examples.
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I don’t think whole-site analysis is very useful in combatting misinformation. The reliability and fullness of facts presented by any single site varies a lot depending on the topic or type of story.
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Other than identifying blatant disinformation sites I don’t see what useful information it provides. But even that’s rare here and rarely needs a bot to spot.
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Why is an open-source, de-centralized platform giving free space to a private company?
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Giving permission for a private trust-assesing company to be operating in an open public forum makes it look as if these assessments reflect a neutral reality that most or all readers would agree on or want to be aware of. It’s a service that people can seek out of they decide they trust it.
Presenting this company’s assessment on each or most articles gives them undue authority that is especially inappropriate on the fediverse.
Thank you, those are the precise point that summarize my gripes with it. In particular, I feel it encourages people to perceive it as an authoritative source and to form their opinions on sites it rates (often wrongly) without additional thinking / fact checking.
It’s basically a company propaganda tool that can change its own option and ratings any time, influencing others in the process.
Those are some great points. I do wish we had something better. But I find it to be “good enough” for when it’s a source I’m unfamiliar with.
Can’t quite say I have the time or motivation to start reading a bunch of other articles from a given source when I’m concerned about its credibility.
TBH, I just don’t think something better is possible - I suspect that there are no valid shortcuts to trust.
Unless something is just obviously bullshit, it will always take some time to develop a sense of how the different sources are treating a new story. Even a trusted source can prove unreliable on a particular topic.
It’s uncomfortable living with that uncertainty until you’ve seen a story from enough angles that you can judge for yourself. But either the story is important enough to me to spend that time, or I just accept that I can’t really know.
TBH, I just don’t think something better is possible - I suspect that there are no valid shortcuts to trust.
That’s why I like MBFC. I understand it’s impossible for them to be perfect and unbiased. But no one else is doing that work, so I’ll take what I can get.
Even a trusted source can prove unreliable on a particular topic.
I like the rule of thumb that good sources are more likely to be biased when reporting things internal to their own country. I usually look for the BBC, but if it’s about the UK, I’ll find another source. Al Jazeera is similar.
MBFC itself is biased and unreliable. On purpose or not it’s system has the effect of pushing the GOP narrative that mainstream news is all leftist propaganda while right wing propaganda is normal. It does this by not having a center category and by misusing the center lean categories it does have.
So for example national papers with recognized excellence in objective reporting are all center left. And then on center right, you have stuff like the Ayn Rand Institute. Which is literally a lobbying organization.
Not having an alternative isn’t an excuse to keep using something that provides bad information.
Yeah, the Overton window has been pushed so far right that neutral sources with no added opinion are now considered center-left.
Same reason sites like Ground News also upset me. Like “yeah sure I totally needed to read that HUNTER BIDEN is absolutely the reason the Democrats are evil totally makes sense oh yeah”, like nah sometimes we can just say these people are massive hypocrites and their opinions and news are literally not factual or useful or important
I’m not going to be surprised when we find out MBFC and Ground News were actually info ops from corporations.
I’m not going to go that far — they’re just poor implementations of things we all want. When GN was created there was significant pushes from so many other companies to create their best little aggregators and summarizers. I’ve always felt it should be more possible to actually “ground” sources and journalists to the actual truth, than whatever these people deem as center. It’s ironic to call it grounded when its foundation is a political landscape mired in lies and grandiosity.
I wouldn’t call it bad information. As a non-American, I just read it as “American left”.
“Centre-left” combined with “Factual Reporting” basically means “grounded in reality”, lol
The problem is many people aren’t tuned into political ideology. The second they see left or right they sort it by their internal bias. So it’s whitewashing a lot of conservative European sources. It’s also rating American far right positions as center right, so absolutely whitewashing them, even for someone who understands MBFC is an American site with American prejudices.
Honestly I’m surprised they’ve lasted 8 years without this getting called out, it should fairly well jump out at anyone who has studied politics.
I’d be happy if someone wanted to make a better site that had better answers and a more international scale. We don’t have it, though
The Ayn Rand Institute actually is center right. They promote strictly free market capitalism, of the laissez-faire variety. This is distinct from any sort of ethno/religious-nationalist position you’d find on what we’d call the far right, espoused by groups like Praeger.
Regarding the newspapers, if they tend to endorse dems in elections, it’d be difficult to argue that they don’t tend to editorially lean at least slightly left.
Note, a lean does not make something misinformation. If someone thinks that center-left means leftist propaganda, that is their mistake in thinking. That does not mean a bias rating service should recategorize everything to fit a left-is-center perspective, failing to take into account wherever the current national overton window happens to sit.
We should want analysis to be from the perspective of a typical fast food eating, reality tv watching, not-super-engaged American if we can manage that, so we can see the breadth of American perspectives in relation to each other. Not some activist-driven wish to reframe America to fit our own perspectives on the truth, regardless of how we may feel about the current sociopolitical environment. Otherwise we risk simply reinforcing our own media bubbles and steadily weakening our own ability to come up with arguments our opposition may potentially find convincing.
Note, it’s important to remember that center does not necessarily mean good. It just means center-for-America. In our current situation, center is not a very good place to be at all, imo at least. I mean, you’re halfway to Donald Trump if you’re in the center. Not good.
The libertarian, “drown the government in the bathtub” group are centrists now?
Are you serious? Social issues aren’t the only thing you can swing left and right on. This is a massive pro corporate blindspot if MBFC continues that as a trend.
Nobody is saying lean makes something misinformation. We’re saying the way the categories are used deceives, “a typical fast food eating, reality tv watching, not-super-engaged American” into believing good objective sources are running biased articles.
And the American left is the center in the rest of the world. Playing into the American idea of centrism only makes the project biased, not some high minded goal. That’s some of that good exceptionalism propaganda.
And reframing things to fit our own perspective? From the person defending the end of the federal government as a centrist position.
You put a lot of high minded stuff in there but it comes down to American Exceptionalism trying to force its views on the rest of the world and a shit take on enlightened centrism. The facts on the ground are clear. MBFC plays favorites for conservatives.
The libertarian, “drown the government in the bathtub” group are centrists now?
American centrist. That’s like 3/4 right :-p
The “laissez-faire” part got me. When anyone leaves gov and especially biz to do their thing without steering and criticism, then people are gonna suffer to make someone some shillings.
No, they’re center-right. The center right still believes in representation and voting, where the far right is an authoritarian movement. This is an important distinction.
So, an editorial slant and objective, fact-based reporting are two different things. Your bias comes in with things like article selection, what you are and are not reporting. You can be strongly biased, but still do objective, fact-based reporting. This is why these are two separate categories. This is not a problem, and both of these independent categories most definitely deserve to be reported independently of each other.
It has nothing to do with exceptionalism. It has to do with performing measurements that are calibrated to the local environment. Someone pointed out that it makes less sense for world news, but for US news and politics communities it is definitely useful.
When did I say the end of the federal government is a centrist position?
You’re a very dishonest arguer. This has nothing to do with any form of American superiority. Simply discussion of American affairs from a perspective calibrated to American people. Saying that this has usefulness is not saying it is superior or exceptional, those are things you, not I, are saying.
We should want analysis to be from the perspective of a typical fast food eating, reality tv watching, not-super-engaged American
Why? Lemmy is a worldwide site.
Some people are pissed that the format is spammy? That’s the complaint I’ve heard.
I’d certainly prefer something like post tagging/labels but within the current feature set of lemmy I think it’s about as good as it could be.
That’s my gripe with it. Its single comment fills the entire screen of my phone when scrolling past and it uses gigantic font, a big separator line (?), and links mixed with text mixed with more links.
Additionally, it fucks with the “new comment” and “hot” sorting, depending on how active Lemmy is at the time, by spamming post after post with a comment even though there is no actual discussion happening.
You should use a client that supports all of the text formatting. On Voyager the bot’s comment is smaller than most when collapsed (which it is by default).
What client do you use? It looks fine in Thunder. (I agree it’s spammy in general, but not because of the formatting.)
I have never seen a bot that does good. Got sick of them on reddit and other sites. So when I see it here which is my safe haven. I will downvote or report it because it has not place here.
Fuck that…not getting on admins or anything but sites need to get rid of bots unless they pay the site. And also get rid of clickbait shit that I saw on reddit but not here yet.
out of personal curiosity, are you seeing this with the bots setting turned off? I thought that setting was a universal setting that just hide all bot posts for the account
