Five @ Five @slrpnk.net

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I agree, Pepe Escobar's take in that opinion piece is complete garbage. It should be noted that it is an opinion piece with the sub text "The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle."

Shutting down the entire journal because one columnist is a Putin apologist isn't what the concept of a free press is about. I'd be less alarmed by mods shutting down a post of that columnist for genocide apology. It looks like it's only one featured columnist out of five occasionally posting garbage like that, and the bulk of their focus is on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Alan Dershowitz, famous for his shit takes, has apologized for torture and genocide and continues to be frequently featured in The Boston Globe, Haaretz, and The Wall Street Journal. Since those sources are posted freely, it would be inconsistent to ban The Cradle over Pepe Escobar.

I support Ukrainians against colonization by Russia, but I'm not threatened by journalists who cover the facts from a different perspective from mine.

Can you demonstrate your claim? I did a perfunctory search, and the stories I found involving Russia seem informative and typically even-handed based on the standards of western journalism.

• Russia steps in to quell tensions between US proxies and Syrian tribes
• Putin hosts PA president in Moscow

Where besides Dave's assessment are you sourcing your information? Isn't it one-sided to only listen to Dave M. Van Zandt's opinion without doing additional investigation?

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.

Dave M. Van Zandt rates Al Jazeera English as "Credibility: Medium" and "Factual Reporting: Mixed"; this is depite the news outlet being recognized worldwide as one of the best in the world.

On Dave's page, he lists two stories out of the enormous corpus they've produced in the last five years as evidence of his biased assessment.

The real issue Dave has with Al Jazeera, as evidenced by his pattern of bad, unscientific, and arbitrary classifications of middle-eastern journalism, is that their journalists occasionally do investigative reporting critical of the Israeli government. He has repeated the indefensible opinion that criticism of Israel is antisemitic.

Dave's personal credibility gatekeeper site, MBFC, is toxic to any forum that considers truth important.

This is part of the reason why sites like MBFC are so toxic. They use 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 themselves 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.

I don't trust MBFC to tell me anything useful about left-leaning sources, or discussion about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but if a right-biased credibility gatekeeper tells me a site I've never encountered before is far-right, I do consider that useful.

Okay, you didn't miss the point. You just can't admit you're wrong about anything.

Just like every good lie has a little bit of truth in it, MBFC wouldn't be able to spin its bullshit as well without usurping the credibility of real fact-checking organizations.

Charitably, I think you missed the point. I didn't imply that van Zandt doesn't highly value pro-science news sources. Although he's not a scientist, and doesn't understand science, he clearly values it highly. That's to his credit. But 'HIGH' and 'VERY HIGH' is not a place on the left-right political spectrum.

We agree that both the human rights of gay people and pro-science publications have no political bias, but one might reasonably place them both on the left of the political spectrum based on the typical positions of politicians in the United States. If climate change clarion callers like Scientific American and NASA are completely devoid of a 'bias' rating according to Van Zandt, what does that tell you about what he thinks about the human rights of LGBTQ+ people?

This bot comment adds nothing of value and only wastes page space, which is actually an improvement over the bot's typical function. MBFC is a threat to media literacy on Lemmy.

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.

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 MBFC's man behind the curtain, Dave M. Van Zandt, undermines the authority of non-partisan fact-checking institutions in the public consciousness.

Where on the political spectrum do you think Dave Van Zandt classifies organizations that are pro-science, and respect the consensus of experts in the given scientific field?

I appreciate you expanding on your earlier comment. I'd love for you to elaborate on science the same way you did for lgbtq+

With the fight to take basic health precautions in the face of a pandemic and acknowledge the reality of climate change championed by Democrats and opposed by Republicans, is the pro-science movement justifiably associated with and classified as left-leaning?

I'd love to skip ahead, but I'm not confident you know where this is going. We agree that gay people having the right to exist is a political issue, but it's not a politically biased opinion.

Is science a political issue? Is it biased to value the authority of scientists on issues like climate change or vaccine effectiveness?

Why then is the position that gay people have the right to exist in public a biased opinion?

Do you think that the position that cisgender straight people have the right to exist in public is a biased opinion? Is that position left or right biased?

“The issue is that MBFC’s ratings are politically motivated…”

proof?

This is not a controversial statement. The designation of the artificial center of MBFC's political spectrum as 'least biased' should raise the eyebrow of anyone paying attention. It bears repeating that award-winning news organizations like The Guardian getting the same "Factual Reporting" rating as Breitbart is alarming, as is the similar categorization of several other reputable left-leaning news periodicals. Van Zandt is also unabashedly Zionist, repeating the slander that media outlets that criticize Israel are antisemitic. He regards LGBT lobby organizations as left leaning, even when they donate to both Democrat and Republican politicians and don't engage in any economic intersectionality. There are several more obvious clues that Van Zandt is not a neutral observer, not the least of which is his own understated admission: that his judgement of left and right is from an "American Perspective" and "may not align with all countries."

I've seen several people refuse to countenance credible sources because MBFC rates their Factual Reporting as MIXED, the importance you place on the distinction between MBFC's "Factual Reporting" and "Credibility Rating" is irrelevant.

The issue is that MBFC's ratings are politically motivated, any particular feature of how they express their biases is less important. The fact that their rating system is convoluted and needs a page of explanation is definitely a demerit though.

Yes.

One of the basics of media literacy is that no source is unbiased. This is one of the flaws with MBFC - rating biased news corporations at the center of its spectrum as 'least-biased' sources. This is not a credible position for an organization that wants to be considered something other than a propaganda mill.

Many of your readers are interpreting political bias to mean credibility, and are rejecting sources that might expand their political horizons. MBFC conflates these two things as well, exacerbating the problem. Dave M Van Zandt rates left-leaning publications as less factual than alt-right outlets with even higher and more egregious problems with factual reporting.

If a reader is curious of the bias of a publication, it's better they do their own research rather than poisoning the well before they see the article. Giving them bad information is worse than leaving them to their own devices and letting them develop media literacy on their own.

And it may not be hard to develop something better. But it's difficult to focus attention on that when we're distracted trying to quell the bleeding wound that is MBFC.

The MBFC is not any part of any solution, and failing to acknowledge how the bot is harming media literacy on Lemmy undermines any future solution you might implement.