MediaBiasFactCheck.com

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MediaBiasFactCheck.com

Postby cmsellers » Sun Jun 11, 2017 4:23 am

I just came across this site, which classifies most sources on left/right and factual reliability axes, while singling some sources out as satire, fake news (divided into "conspiracy/psuedoscience" and "questionable sources"), or pro-science. With the name, you'd think it's going to be a far-right site. And indeed, it's has a tendency to class sources traditionally treated by the establishment as centrist, such as the NYTimes, WaPo, and Atlantic as center-left.

However there's a lot of people who would agree with those classifications, and there's several other issues which I see as much more problematic:

  1. It doesn't recognize biases other than various degrees of right/left. This is problematic because there's plenty of biases which aren't necessarily left-right. In the US, these include centrist biases, libertarian biases, and pro-establishment biases. The site generally treats a libertarian bias as center-right and centrist and establishment biases as being "least biased." Then you have sites like Hurriyet Daily News and Rudaw, foreign sources which are fairly centrist on US political issues but have extreme (Kemalist and Kurdish nationalist respectively) biases where their own areas are concerned.
  2. Almost everything is treated as having "high" factual reliability. When you group the Christian Science Monitor and The Huffington Post in the same class of factual reliability, that class is too broad.
  3. One of only two sources I found with a "very high" factual rating is the BBC. While this is a popular perception in America, I regularly encounter false and misleading statements in BBC articles. The BBC is certainly no better than sources like The Economist and Christian Science Monitor which are listed as merely "high," and I would rate it with CNN, which they consider "mixed."
  4. There doesn't seem to be a real system to the special classifications. In particular, Cracked is listed as "satire." But for the most part, it's not satire, it presents infotainment articles of often-questionable reliability, but has standards for sourcing and fact-checking. Yet because it's "satire," it gets a cop-out from the system entirely.
In short, this site isn't really useful for anything, but it's still somewhat amusing to look through, and not as bad as you'd expect from the name.
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Re: MediaBiasFactCheck.com

Postby tinyrick » Fri Jul 28, 2017 3:56 pm

When people try to classify personal beliefs on a numerical scale, things get kind of hazy. It's the same problem with the terrorist alert system the Bush administration came up with. Code Yellow and Code Orange didn't really tell us anything. Things get really hazy when you get into the Libertarian political belief. If we had a purely Libertarian government in place, gays would be allowed to get married, but venues would be allowed to refuse to service them. If you took one of those political compass tests, it would label you a centrist, and your dot would appear right next to the person that thinks gays shouldn't be allowed to be married, but civil unions are ok. Those are two completely different viewpoints, though.
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Re: MediaBiasFactCheck.com

Postby Grimstone » Sat Jul 29, 2017 1:24 am

I think if we had a libertarian government we'd wind up with an actual plutocracy and libertarians seem to be more neutral towards civil rights issues than they are pro/active about them, so.. I'm pretty sure businesses would be allowed to discriminate a lot more under a libertarian government but not so sure about things like gays being allowed to marry.
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