This project began as a post about a year ago, in which we followed the provenance of the data from a study about misinformation until, at the bottom, we found Media Bias/Fact Check. Upon further examination, it turned out that Media Bias/Fact Check is just some guy, and upon him there rests a surprising amount of academic research. We’ve since turned this into a study with the following abstract:
Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) purports to quantify the bias, credibility, and factuality of reporting for roughly 10,000 media sources, and the resulting data is commonly used in misinformation research. In the present study, we show that MBFC’s methodology does not meet basic standards of rigor for academic research. Despite its widespread prevalence, studies using MBFC rarely examine it carefully, often describing it in ways that contradict its “About” page, or treating it as authoritative despite MBFC’s disclaimer that it is “not a tested scientific method… [but] a simple guide to the idea of a source’s bias.” We identified no papers that adequately describe MBFC as the opinions of a single person or critically engage with its methodology in order to justify proceeding with its use. We argue that MBFC’s data is not neutral or accurate, but a computationally legible account of hegemony, a specious dataset for uncritical research that mistakes the familiarity of the concepts it quantifies with accuracy. Our study concludes with a call for academic researchers to stop using MBFC. MBFC’s data quantifies the results of political processes, including campaigns to discredit the press, and presents them as simple facts about the world, thus reproducing the crisis misinformation scholarship exists to address.
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MBFC is ran by a Zionist shill. They rate UNWatch which is a straight up Israeli think-tank calling everyone including Francesca Albanese Hamas as “high credibility”. And MBFC knows very well that it’s a Zionist propaganda cesspool but they use their reputation to endorse it anyway.
This is UNWatch right now:
Yeah the whole website is just bullshit. My favorite example of how dumb it is: FAIR.org, the explicitly progressive media watchdog, is rated to the right of New York Times. FAIR frequently critiques the NYT from the left. It’s like one of their main things.
They really want to keep the illusion that NYT isn’t just a right wing imperialist rag alive.
Another great one is the “high credibility” ADL https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/anti-defamation-league/
MBFC is just a hodgepodge of Zionist shilling and pro-US Liberal propaganda. But since all other Liberal “media watchdogs” are basically all the exact same they can all claim to be “fair and unbiased”.
Western media really is just
I’ve been saying this for over two years.
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.
Love that Joe Rogan is in the center of that chart.
The linked paper has some of the graphs you’re looking for, and much analysis that I think you’ll like. I even cite both Bernays and Chomsky in the paper. I’m also happy to send you the MBFC data if you’d like. If you want to just get it for yourself, the API has a freemium API tier that only lets you make a handful of requests, but each request gives you the whole dataset, so it’s basically free unless you want to keep updating it.
The “spectacle of computation” is a great callback.
If you want to see an example of utter nonsense “data-driven” research, Roll in the Tanks! Measuring Left-wing Extremism on Reddit at Scale. Older versions of the paper had a whole section dedicated to lemmygrad.ml.
Why would they write this? Presumably because that’s where grant money is being directed lately. Previously, three years ago: Atlantic Council: Collective Security in a Federated World
The Atlantic Council is the Global North’s premier foreign policy think tank, and the fediverse is on its radar now. PDF
Emphasis mine:
Many discussions about social media governance and trust and safety are focused on a small number of centralized, corporate-owned platforms that currently dominate the social media landscape: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and a handful of others. The emergence and growth in popularity of federated social media services, like Mastodon and Bluesky, introduces new opportunities, but also significant new risks and complications. This annex offers an assessment of the trust and safety (T&S) capabilities of federated platforms—with a particular focus on their ability to address collective security risks like coordinated manipulation and disinformation.
We need someone with some Marxist literacy to create a similar project and call it like something equally neutral sounding, like, “media bias credibility meter”.
I guess prolewiki already could handle this, but liberals are immediately turned off by the partisan pro-worker viewpoint, and are easily duped by anything that sounds neutral on its cover.
We’ve been saying that for years, but good luck!
Yep, this was a big thing on lemmy for a bit and the fact it isnt used at all here anymore i think speaks to the general concensus on it
I actually had no idea. Can you tell me more about this or maybe dig up some old links? Trying to find some myself but haven’t had any luck.
I do know that wikipedia has flagged it as an unreliable source for some time, so big win for wikipedia’s editors over peer-review.
I found this one and I think there was a lot more. https://lemmy.ml/post/18540211/12622685
A while back .world had MBFC as a required judge for which websites were allowed to be submitted and it led to a lot of drama. They have since basically scrubbed MBFC away which is objectively an improvement.
Really cool. Thanks for digging it up! I will be looking into.
No problem. I also tried Googling it but I think Lemmy is fully censored on Google which is… Interesting…
Who is we?
It was a big debacle on .world a while back
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Super interesting and looking forward to sharing it with my collaborators. It’s fascinating how much more successful internet communities have been at spotting MBFC as bullshit than academics doing peer reviewed research.
Sane people.
Well, now there are at least two of us.
A lot of people reject it, but zio/nazis.
Just maeve i think, but it sounds better that way
Never heard of this site but wow. Beyond parody.
Oh wow! I hadn’t noticed this one. Absolutely fucking hilarious!
The fact it seems people were taking this clearly joke of a site seriously is concerning however.
Not just take it seriously, a lot of people treat it as essentially divine truth.
We laugh, but its creator was and is as serious as a heart attack.
So we laugh even harder.
Yup! Very concerning!
We identified no papers that adequately describe MBFC as the opinions of a single person or critically engage with its methodology in order to justify proceeding with its use. We argue that MBFC’s data is not neutral or accurate, but a computationally legible account of hegemony, a specious dataset for uncritical research that mistakes the familiarity of the concepts it quantifies with accuracy.
The reason .world’s admins and @jordanlund@lemmy.world like MB/FC is because it aligns with their hegemonic capitalist, imperial core point of view.
100%. That’s how it works in the academic misinformation research too. Both MBFC and the researchers are downstream of the same propaganda (as we all are) and lack the curiosity to look beyond it.
There’s a lack of curiosity, but also a paucity of grant money for looking beyond it, because the money comes from the federal government and from non-profits funded by billionaires & corporations.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
I like MBFC because there literally is no other free source measuring both bias and, more importantly, credibility.
Left / Right bias is fine, as long as the site is credible.
I have not yet seen any site they say is credible, but is not, or vice versa, a site they mark questionable that is actually a valid source.
“Medium Credibility” is not something I personally remove, only Questionable.
Examples:
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/press-tv/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/russian-news-agency-tass/
measuring both bias and, more importantly, credibility.
It isn’t measuring anything though; it doesn’t have any kind of methodology for providing a quantitative value. It’s just one guy’s personal opinion based on vibes.
I have not yet seen any site they say is credible, but is not, or vice versa, a site they mark questionable that is actually a valid source.
And how would you even know if it did?
Because I have eyes and have been consuming media for 50 years? LOL.
But seriously, find someone they say is questionable who is not, or someone they say is credible who is not. It’s cool, I’ll wait.
How exactly does the biological fact that you have eyes and consume media allow you to determine whether a source is credible or not. And if that’s true, well, we all have eyes and consume media, so what the fuck do we need some random dipshits personal opinion website for.
But seriously, find someone they say is questionable who is not, or someone they say is credible who is not.
Multiple examples have already been provided in this very thread, including an outright Israeli propaganda site being marked as reliable.
It’s cool, I’ll wait.
Aren’t you a middle aged man? Why do you still talk like an insufferable teenage loser?
Aren’t you a middle aged man? Why do you still talk like an insufferable teenage loser?
His development arrested at the self-centered, know-it-all stage; the cringiest stage.
With experience comes wisdom. It’s really quite simple. If you can’t look at a source and go “Well, that has to be bullshit”, you’re going to have a bad time on the internet.
Sometimes I get surprised, rarely, it does happen.
The worst sites are the new ones that pop up with absolutely no history and appear to just be AI slop.
So what the fuck do we need some random dipshits personal opinion website for?
Multiple examples have already been provided in this very thread, including an outright Israeli propaganda site being marked as reliable.
Because not everyone is smart enough to recognize that Fox News is bullshit or that TASS is Russian propaganda.
Further, bad actors will insist “no it’s not” to which moderators can simply reply:
Left / Right bias is fine, as long as the site is credible.
MBFC is literally just some guy’s opinion blog, there’s nothing credible about it. It has the appearance of neutrality on its cover, and 1 page in it comes out as staunchly pro-zionist.
Cite your examples, as I did. Find a source that they say is questionable who is solid, or vice versa, a source they say is credible when they are not.
I gave 4 examples.
Lol
Removed by mod
Lol
Damn it, that sounds unsound enough that it’s not even still useful for personal use. That’s a shame. A more rigorous version of MB/FS would be genuinely useful when a major event happens to help filter out the nonsense.
The thread has been enlightening. I don’t think I’ve used MBFC in a while, but I thought the concerns were only that it used an American perspective for left/right instead of a global or true definition of it. (As in, Democrat left, Republican right. When in reality Democrats are a center-right party.) But I didn’t realize these other things.
