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[+] 0 points 11 months ago* (5 children)
  • [–] [S] 5 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Super interesting. This source has always been ringing some kind of distant alarm bell for me, because of things that are just a tiny bit off like the examples I quoted above. I think I'll take it out from !lefty_news@ibbit.at. I couldn't care less about the MBFC rating, but Wikipedia's list, I give a good bit of weight to.

    I'll leave this story up, because what the hell what's the harm, but I think I'll start to avoid them in the future. This is all good to know.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    It is so aggravating that "Mostly Factual" makes the situation (and the many, many news sources that can legitimately be called "Mostly Factual" or worse) sound so much better and more reliable than they actually are.

    I prefer my news sources to be Entirely Factual thank you very much, that should be the minimum acceptable standard of factualness. Even then facts can be still be omitted or framed in a misleading way and a lot of harm can be done that way, and that's why it's only the absolute minimum required to be credible. The fact that we call news organizations who can't even reach this basic standard "Mostly Factual" is itself misleading and that's such bullshit. It would be better described as "Only Occasionally Known to Lie And Mislead" or "Carefully Hides Some Lies Among Mostly Truth".

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 11 months ago

    Wikipedia's list is much more useful. "Reliable," "unreliable," or occasionally "sometimes one sometimes the other depending on subject matter / date of publication / similar, here's more detail."

    You know, useful categories for someone trying to decide what source to include.

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  • [+] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] [S] 1 point 11 months ago

    They do sometimes have useful and pertinent information, sure. But they also are screamingly wrong about a lot of stuff. They rate the New York Times as highly factual when they absolutely are not ("They are considered one of the most reliable sources for news information due to proper sourcing and well-respected journalists/editors. The failed fact checks were on Op-Eds and not straight news reporting."), they rate MSNBC and Al Jazeera as "mixed" which is the same as the New York Post, they put Newsweek above both of them at "mostly factual" ("We also rate them as Mostly Factual in reported rather than high due to having to make corrections on false information after publication.")... they're just kind of generally all over the place.

    It is more or less just one guy and his subjective impressions of each source, which normally would be semi-okay even if far inferior to Wikipedia's consensus and analysis based community approach, but that one guy also has some flagrant biases (chief among them that a source has to be pro-Israel in order to be "factual" in his world.)

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