This is an honest question because I see the media bias bot being consistently downvoted and don’t understand why. Can you fill me in? Why is the media bias bot hated so much? It seems fairly reasonable in its assessments. For example:
- Daily Vox: Left with High factuality
- Huffington Post: Left with Mixed factuality
- MSNBC: Left with Mixed factuality
- NPR: Left-Center with High factuality
- Reuters: Least Biased with Very High factuality
- Forbes: Right-Center with Mostly Factual factuality
- Fox: Extreme-Right with Mixed factuality
- OAN: Extreme-Right with Low factuality
- Newsmax: Extreme-Right with Low factuality
- Infowars: Extreme-Right with Very Low factuality
- Conspiracy Level: Tin Foil Hat
- Pseudo-Sci Level: Strong
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this is a worldwide news sub. the bot is ridiculously US-centric. everything it considers left or centre is right wing at best.
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it’s the pet project of literally one guy, based entirely on his opinions. he’s very clearly got biases, too: very pro-right wing, pro-israeli.
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it has extremely ridiculous justifications for a lot of why the “left” publications are considered “mixed”, and right-wing publications don’t get the same treatment.
It’s just totally useless garbage. It would be just as worthwhile as having a bot to automatically post my personal opinion of every news website beneath every post on this community.
I take it that you would argue that the media bias bot is worse than nothing?
I’m not arguing in favor of the media bias bot in particular here. I’m just kind of thinking about what might be a better solution. Given the fractured media landscape at the moment, it seems unreasonable to expect everyone to immediately have know the various biases of each news source. Having tools that help with that, even if they are themselves biased, seems like a good starting point for understanding the bias of different news organizations. Is there a better way to develop a similar tool that provides more useful information?
Just my 2c while taking a shit, I think if the bot just printed the direct name of the news source (“Sky News Australia”, “CNN”, " The Guardian") and additionally said “This is the automatically detected source of this news. Please consider replying to this comment with a better source if you think one exists”
It makes it clear there’s zero bias and encourages conversation with other users here. It also is a reminder in case you might be skimming past and miss the domain it’s from, and you personally can judge “Oh, that’s what I think is a reputable source”, “Oh, it’s those wankers, this is garbage” or “I haven’t heard of that source before, I’ll be skeptical” as some examples
NPR, WAPO, NYT, BBC, and other papers that strive for objective reporting are all listed as leftist.
Even the terms, “left center” and “right center” are loaded. Go read an academic paper that includes polling. You’re going to see terms like “non-aligned”, “leans left”, and “leans right”. Because even the terms we use to discuss bias can induce bias.
There is a substantially pro conservative bias here when objective reporting is placed on the same level as a GOP controlled campaign website such as American Action Network.
Overall, we rate the American Action Network (AAN) as Right-Center biased based on political positions and advocacy that favor the right.
At best this is incompetent. At worst this is a long running misinformation op meant to wash right wing propaganda and make it look equal to reporting from The Guardian.
Speaking of which, they have a “mixed” credibility rating based on 5 failed fact checks from years ago. Which is the same rating Breitbart has with double the number of failed fact checks.
In the “long running misinformation op” category of evidence we have several libertarian websites marked as “right center” and “mixed” credibility. As a refresher for those of us who haven’t taken a political ideology class, these are the guys who coined the phrase, “drown it in a bath tub” when referencing government. They are the guys running around arguing that your employer’s corporation has more 1st and 2nd amendment rights than you do.
So yeah my money is on the guy who runs this thing being a libertarian trying to wash their ideology to look mainstream. Because when you think, the Ayn Rand Institute, and BBC, NYT, WAPO, NPR , and The Guardian all have the same level of bias, you’ve got some problems.
It’s point of definition of left is further right than most people, especially on Lemmy. There is no absolute left or right. It’s not useful without defining what point is the center. Their center point is an (older) American center, but further right than most of the world (and likely a modern American).
Okay, I can certainly see that perspective and, after reading the link posted by @ayyy@InEnduringGrowStrong@sh.itjust.works I can see how this scale is problematic in other ways since news bias isn’t one-dimensional.
Is there a better way to educate people about the bias of particular new organizations, though? It seems unreasonable to expect everyone to develop their own individual assessment of every news organization. There are simply too many of them offering too many different spins. This attempt at providing something easily digestible seems like a reasonable starting point. It’s certainly not perfect and has a lot of room for improvement but is it worse than nothing?
The responses the admin who added the bot gave to people’s concerns when they announced it, weren’t that great. (Link)
The Lemmy.world admin disregarded all criticism and just said people shouldn’t complain, after just asking for feedback in the post itself
Example:
What a terrible idea.
MBFC is already incredibly biased.
It should be rejected not promoted.
Admin response:
Ok then tell me an alternative we can use in the scale for free.
None? Then pls dont just complain complain complain… And dont suggest improvements.
(Yes, I just took my old comment)
There’s nothing wrong with MBFC. The arguments against it are silly. Most of the time people will link one entry that they typically haven’t read that very often says the opposite of what they claim. Even in those cases, it’s a look at about one hundredth of one percent of the content evaluated by MBFC. Serious sample size problem. When researchers use their entire dataset to compare MBFC to other bias monitors (both orgs and academic sources), what they find is consensus.
This study compared 6 organizations and found consensus across thousands of news sites. Another recent study concluded that it doesn’t matter which one you use because the level of agreement between them is so high. One thing you won’t find ‘critics’ doing is citing peer-reviewed research in high-quality journals to support their arguments because it just doesn’t exist. MBFC is used in research all the time by people who’ve dedicated their lives to understanding media/bias/misinfo/propaganda. Those people have real skin in the game and could have their careers damaged or destroyed by using poor resources. And yet. That it’s a good enough resource for serious research but not good enough for our news sharing communities is a pretty laughable idea.
These are some questions that don’t have great answers for those folks:
- How can 6 independent groups, using different methodologies, arrive at the same conclusions through random chance?
- If the bias in MBFC is so pervasive, why can’t anyone find it?
- How is MBFC never shown to be an outlier if it’s ‘one guy’s arbitrary opinion’?
