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Credit to Keeponstalin@lemmy.world for assembling all of these references from different journals in the post text.

It's important to remember Dave Van Zandt is not a social scientist, and is not qualified to run a 'scientific' political bias gatekeeping organization.

DVZ identifies as an 'independent voter' but has an obvious right-wing political bias. To his credit, he understands the importance of reporting the consensus of the scientific community, rather than elevating fringe science and pseudoscience in the public consciousness.

To DVZ, center-left means conservative Democrats, and center-right means Republicans. Every news agency, periodical, and lobbyist group he considers relevant he's placed somewhere on his stunted spectrum, except for one category.

Republicans have sought to defund NOAA, and attack science. Most Democrats at least acknowledge climate change is happening and many are trying to actively prevent it. Democrats are the pro-science party. Instead of placing NOAA and similar pro-science organizations on the left, he's created a 'pro-science' category where publications exist outside the left-right political spectrum.

Meanwhile, the scientific consensus is that LGBTQ+ people are not mentally ill or possessed by demons, they are people who deserve the same human rights as everyone else. The Human Rights Campaign is an American single-issue non-profit to promote the human rights of LGBTQ+ people in a non-partisan fashion. To wit, HRC has been criticized for occasionally supporting Republican candidates that support gay marriage, which is acknowledged specifically by DVZ. Instead of placing this advocacy group in the pro-science category, or in its own place elevated above the political spectrum, he has placed the non-partisan HRC on the out-of-center left of his political spectrum.

LGBTQ+ people should not have the advocacy of their human rights categorized as a fringe political position, when other organizations for the advocacy of the consensus of the scientific community are above categorization. Lemmy.World's !news and !politics mods are endorsing DVZ's bigoted political beliefs by promoting his site as an authority in their communities.

I support opening up vote logs to moderators in their own communities. Voting records add useful context to the nature of the exchanges happening, eg. if two people are having a back and forth, but neither is downvoting the other, it contextualizes the disagreement as less hostile.

I don't think it's a good idea to give every new user the burden of using that information responsibly. A minority would use it to retaliate, stalk, and harass, and there would be too many of them to reasonably hold them accountable.

Membership in the IFCN provides a method for member organizations to be held accountable to the IFCN code.

Would you trust an organization that claims to follow a code, but has either been denied and had their membership rescinded for violations of that code, or has chosen to avoid being held accountable in the first place?

The main thing that tipped me off this guy was not to be respected was this line from an article someone pointed out to me:

As Russian President Vladimir Putin made very clear during his Tucker Carlson interview seen by one billion people worldwide, Ukraine is part of Russian civilization – even if it is not part of the Russian Federation. So shelling ethnic Russian civilians in Donbass – still ongoing – translates as attacks on Russia.

Tucker Carlson has been legally demonstrated in court to be not a serious journalist. His interview with Putin was widely panned by experts to be a farce, specifically and especially Putin's nebulous claims about Ukraine belonging to Russia and Tucker's uncritical reception of those claims.

Pepe's uncritical endorsement of Tucker's journalism and Putin's claims deserve ridicule.

Regardless of who it was targeted at, I've definitely experienced my share of similar accusations. Lemmy.world culture seems to favor low effort 'bad faith' accusations, and I wish that weren't the case.

Sorry, no mea culpa. Let me elaborate. Van Zandt claims to value IFCN fact-checkers in his ratings, then he uses that laundered credibility to gatekeep minority and politically inconvenient voices. Here's a recent example brought to my attention.

It should be noted that despite no non-partisan fact checkers are listed on MBFC's site as raising concerns about the The Cradle's credibility, Van Zandt has arbitrarily placed it in the "Factual Reporting: Mixed" and "Credibility: Medium" categories. The concerns he posits about The Cradle's 'lack of transparency, poor sourcing," and one-sidedness clearly apply to the weird right-wing guy who makes these opaque decisions about journalistic value.

If IFCN fact-checkers have issues with sources he'd like to denigrate, he's happy to list them even if they've since been resolved. But they don't make up the central criteria for his 'methodology' as he'd like you to believe. Meanwhile he's free to make unreferenced claims about the credibility of others that uncareful readers take completely at face value.

All the concerns I have about The Cradle's credibility have been developed in spite of MBFC, which is the opposite of what you want if your goal is accountability and media literacy. And thanks to their reliance on this charlatan, LW!news have recently punted what I think is a valuable report.

While I think this specific journalist is a piece of shit, I applaud your restraint.

MBFC uses non-partisan fact-checking institutions to bolster their credibility, while holding none of the standards. Then they use that laundered credibility to gatekeep minority and politically inconvenient voices.

It should be noted that despite no non-partisan fact checkers are listed on MBFC's site as raising concerns about the The Cradle's credibility, Dave M. Van Zandt has arbitrarily placed it in the "Factual Reporting: Mixed" and "Credibility: Medium" categories. One of the concerns he posits is The Cradle's 'lack of transparency,' but the weird right-wing guy who decides these ratings also lacks any transparency himself in the method he used to come to that conclusion.

Fact checking should increase media literacy and identify bad actors that fabricate news, not justify the destruction of a diverse and healthy media environment.

Pepe Escobar is a defender of Putin's colonization of Ukraine. His participation in a source where the main thrust of their reporting has been against the genocide of Palestinians undermines their message when he's not also critical of the ethnic cleansing of eastern Ukraine and the kidnapping of Ukrainian children into Russia.

Ask a socialist what's wrong with Lemmy.world, they'll give you a myriad of issues. Ask a capitalist what's wrong with Lemmy.ml, they'll describe Lemmy.world.

A appreciate your work demonstrating The Cradle's support for the Russian state. It's the first time I can remember seeing The Cradle posted on here, and in between being subscribed to these communities and my contributions to LemmyWorldDefenseHQ, I have not seen The Cradle spam as a reported or observed problem.

I've read the article, and I find it valuable. I'm alarmed that the Lemmy World !politics and !news mods have failed to demonstrate the pressing need for the ham-fisted gatekeeping and censorship regime they've implemented.

Lemmy.World is the largest instance, and !politics and !news are flagship communities. I would like to see the Fediverse overtake corporate forums, and learning to approach the spectrum of journalistic credibility with nuance is an essential feature of a better version of social media.

Maybe read the article and make those determinations for yourself?

I can't for the life of me understand why this particular article is so threatening to LW !news mods. It provides valuable insight into how Facebook's community guidelines are experienced by journalists outside of the political mainstream and has useful lessons for why and how we might do things differently in the Fediverse.

Oh, so if he sincerely believes in genocide, it’s fine.

Regardless of our conflict, we can agree that Pepe Escobar is a shithead.

There's an old joke that goes:

Two people, a Hexbear and a Solarpunk were arguing. One said,

“On my server I can reply to an admin and say "I don't like how you're running things on this instance!"

"I can do that too!"

"Really?"

"Yes! I can reply to an admin and say, "I don't like how the SLRPNK admins are running things on their instance!"

My concern is that the criteria you are using to justify banning The Cradle would also ban most United States media as well. I value the principle of a free press, and what you're proposing is inconsistent with those values. It's easy to call for the ban of information that disagrees with us, but unless we develop a more nuanced approach to combating propaganda, we risk replicating the values of the authoritarian systems we oppose.

If you'd like to see it discussed elsewhere, you're welcome to cross-post it.

This is part of culture clash between old social media culture and Fediverse norms. If moderators choose to censor this discussion as well, it's only going to get bigger.

Pro-Palestinian delegates to Democratic convention to push for Israel arms embargo

How do you distinguish between opinion and propaganda? Its entirely credible that Pepe Escobar sincerely believes the positions he holds.

Should the corpus of every news source that includes opinion pieces that serve the interests of a war criminal state be banned?

I disagree, and that's part of the reason I'm so strongly opposed to Lemmy.World's use of Dave Van Zandt's site in their bot. Fact-checking is an essential tool in fighting the waves of fake news polluting the public discourse. But if that fact-checking is partisan, then it only acerbates the problem of people divided on the basics of a shared reality.

This is why a consortium of fact-checking institutions have joined together to form the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and laid out a code of principles. You can find a list of signatories as well as vetted organizations on their website. You can read more about those principles here.

MBFC is not a signatory to the IFCN code of principles. As a partisan organization, it violates the standards that journalists have recognized as essential to restoring trust in the veracity of the news. Partisan fact-checking sites are worse than no fact-checking at all. Just like how the proliferation of fake news undermines the authority of journalism, the growing popularity of a fact-checking site by a political hack like Dave M. Van Zandt undermines the authority of non-partisan fact-checking institutions in the public consciousness.

Yeah, that's not great, but it's not outside the bounds of what you'd typically find in the uncritical reporting of Western politicians in periodicals like Reuters.

The issue isn't that The Cradle is biased, all journalism is biased. The issue is that they're being treated with the tools that should only be reserved for conspiracy mills and AI fake news farms. I find that alarming.