zephyreks

Meanwhile, Canada's support for Israel has no relation to the close economic, cultural, and political relations Canada has with the US and Europe.

It's entirely relevant. If a source is bad as a whole, the foundation of trust you evidently have for it is built on sand.

Cool.

I cannot fathom a good faith justification for allowing a resource that intentionally obfuscates the media landscape in an effort to compress the entire landscape onto a 2D plane from a person who cannot be found through any conventional means and very well may not exist. Their methodology is bunk for a number of reasons, but we'll focus specifically on how they evaluate factuality.

1. As you know, op-eds typically fall under different journalistic purview than news stories. This is as true for the NYT and SCMP (newspapers of record) as it is for Breitbart. Mixing the factuality rating for op-eds and news stories is rather questionable.

2. The rating scheme works by sampling (how? nobody knows) a small number of stories from each paper and evaluating their factuality. This destroys the validity of the data, as different news sources cover different stories and categories of stories vary in factuality. For example, a paper which records the daily weather temperature in Toronto would be "very highly accurate" even if they release a story saying that water is dry and trees are fake once a month. Because of the limitations of sampling, their methodology leads to inherently skewed results.

3. The definition of propaganda used is... Unclear. This is obvious as statements made by the US government and repeated by other news agencies are not considered propaganda, despite their factual inaccuracy. For example, "40 beheaded babies" (later demonstrated to be false) and "we [the United States] have the most sophisticated semiconductors in the world" (literally, provably, false because TSMC's Taiwan fabs are the clear and undisputed leader).

4. They fail to do due diligence on sourcing because of a (I assume) lack of experience. For example, in their critique of their article "Fake data - the disease afflicting China's vaccine system," they say that the article is poorly sourced because it lacks hyperlinks. The article in question cites: a Hong Kong microbiologist (by name), a professor at the University of Hong Kong (by name), the WHO, stories published in the China Economic Times, data from the State Drug Administration, a law case against Changsheng Biotech, and an unnamed head of a disease control center in China. This, they claim, is a use of "quotes or sources to themselves rather than providing hyperlinks." Their evaluation of "sourcing" seems to be dependent almost entirely on the usage of hyperlinks.

5. They fail to consistently apply standards applied to smaller news outlets (such as Al Jazeera) to larger news outlets (such as the New York Times and CNN). Against Al Jazeera, they claim that wordplay is used that is negative towards Israel. However, as covered by The Intercept and The Guardian, the New York Times and others have just as extreme (if not more extreme) policies surrounding wordplay that is used to show Israel in a positive light. In major newspapers, for example, the words "slaughter," "massacre," and "horrific" are reserved almost exclusively for Israeli deaths rather than Palestinian deaths.

6. MBFC is not consistent with the sources of their fact checks. Against Al Jazeera, they point to "The forgotten massacre that ignited the Kashmir dispute" as not crediting the image correctly. In fact, the caption describes exactly what the image shows, which is exactly what the original source for the image (which they cite) claims.

7. I can go on...

Again, if it's trivial to do the legwork and discredit a source anyway, then do that. If it's not, then don't outsource the work just because you don't understand it.

"[MBFC's] subjective assessments leave room for human biases, or even simple inconsistencies, to creep in. Compared to Gentzkow and Shapiro, the five to 20 stories typically judged on these sites represent but a drop of mainstream news outlets’ production." - Columbia Journalism Review

"Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific." - PolitiFact journalists

Journalists seem to agree with me, which you'd know if you actually read "all of my comments." This isn't the first time I've posted these quotes in this thread.

Your claim is that... Credibility exists unless disproven? Consider that for a minute.

We don't allow LLM-generated summaries as news stories. Do the legwork, use these tools to start if you want to, but don't cite them as though they are gospel.

You can trivially verify that an open-source project works. Good luck verifying a subjective rating.

I don't think you quite understand what an ad hominem attack is. The fact is, the operator of MBFC has no accountability if they get anything wrong because nobody knows who or what he is. The fact is, the operator of MBFC uses his degrees and experience as justification for his "scientific" evaluation of media bias.

I'm not making any claims that the operator isn't making themselves.

An LLM also "aggregates and analyzes a ton of sources, and gives generally accurate information about how they are funded, where they are based, and how well the cite original sources."

That doesn't make an LLM a useful source.

The OP is using this "source" to discredit other sources. If you're going to disprove another source, prove that your own source is legitimate in spite of the questions regarding its credibility.

A person without credentials, without experience, and without any evidence to prove that their claimed credentials or experience are legitimate... Is a credible source?

Can you find any evidence, any at all that the person actually has the credentials that they themselves claim? This is trivial to do for pretty much any modern journalist, but I've been able to find zero information on him.