Hi all!
As many of you have noticed, many Lemmy.World communities introduced a bot: @MediaBiasFactChecker@lemmy.world. This bot was introduced because modding can be pretty tough work at times and we are all just volunteers with regular lives. It has been helpful and we would like to keep it around in one form or another.
The !news@lemmy.world mods want to give the community a chance to voice their thoughts on some potential changes to the MBFC bot. We have heard concerns that tend to fall into a few buckets. The most common concern we’ve heard is that the bot’s comment is too long. To address this, we’ve implemented a spoiler tag so that users need to click to see more information. We’ve also cut wording about donations that people argued made the bot feel like an ad.
Another common concern people have is with MBFC’s definition of “left” and “right,” which tend to be influenced by the American Overton window. Similarly, some have expressed that they feel MBFC’s process of rating reliability and credibility is opaque and/or subjective. To address this, we have discussed creating our own open source system of scoring news sources. We would essentially start with third-party ratings, including MBFC, and create an aggregate rating. We could also open a path for users to vote, so that any rating would reflect our instance’s opinions of a source. We would love to hear your thoughts on this, as well as suggestions for sources that rate news outlets’ bias, reliability, and/or credibility. Feel free to use this thread to share other constructive criticism about the bot too.
Addressing the Overton window issue is the main fix I would hope for.
The proposed solution of a home-brewed open-source methodology of determining bias without the Overton influence would be a very welcome improvement in my opinion.
This is far and away the most frequently mentioned issue in posts I’ve seen. It’s also the one I would like to see addressed.
I don’t know enough to know how accurate this chart actually is, but I’ve seen it tossed around plenty:
https://guides.library.harvard.edu/newsleans/thechart
https://libapps.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/56624/images/Media-Bias-Chart-12.0_Jan-2024-Licensed-scaled.jpg
Why does that image only have the sun and the rebel from Canadian media? Both are given more credibility than they deserve, the rebel in particular has history, bunch of white supremacists and alt right personalities were or are still involved, publication absolutely stokes hate and fear.
Edit: I’m still at a loss, why those? The Globe and Mail, McLean’s, The Toronto Star, National Post, CBC all have better reputations domestically (though natpost and the sun are a circle these days and most print media is owned by American Hedge Funds so…), far more likely to actually get the news instead of opinion masquerading as news in one of those.
MBFC and Ad Fontes are both part of the same grift, to artificially raise the value of right-wing journalism, while artificially denigrating left-wing journalism, so their maps of media come out looking like a horseshoe with the apex dominated by corporate advertising conglomerates that use journalism as their hook.
The CEOs of conglomerates will happily fund this propaganda, and a surprising number of people will pay good money to have the ‘horseshoe theory’ lie repeated back to them.