Talk:Media Bias/Fact Check

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Criticism section is rather pointless[edit]

The ONLY source for the one complaint in the Criticism section is a competing organisation in the area of fact checking. It's like including a comment from General Motors in the Chrysler article. I know nothing of the relative merits of either company, but this section doesn't convince me of anything. HiLo48 (talk) 01:06, 22 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You are correct. It should be noted that the criticisms are all from 2018 or before. It is 2022 and clearly the website is no longer an amateur operation. There is also highly misleading out of context information on this page. From the page they state Van Zandt admits he is not an expert and that "his methods are not rigorously objective." This quote makes it seem like it is coming from Van Zandt. It is not. It is coming from a book where the author does make that statement, but then goes on to praise MBFC for their value. Why focus on that statement rather than this expert linguist's assertion that MBFC is "crucial" and a "genuine site dedicated to helping readers." It seems the editor of this Wiki is willfully attempting to hurt MBFC, while ignoring their perfect score with Newsguard, etc. This is why Wikipedia is not trusted. Tommythecat69 (talk) 15:39, 11 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Just a note: the quotation "his methods are not rigorously objective" is given in a book and stated to have come from the Solender (2018) article that I have now cited on the page. That article doesn't contain the quotation. MaryMO (AR) (talk) 21:38, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Recent expansion[edit]

I'm having difficulty making sense of some of the edits in the recent expansion, especially this removal of content from the Reception section combined with a major change to the lede. - Hipal (talk) 22:19, 8 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Hipal: I agree with you that there are problems with recent changes.
  • I have problems with the Poynter article on two counts: First this is a direct quote and therefore a copyvio "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." and second, it you follow the links in the quote, one goes to a 404 and the other to a tweet about the Iffy quotient, neither of which seems substantive. It seems to me that what is being quoted is nothing more than an unsupported opinion.
  • The Scientific Reports seems to me to be a very effective summary of opinions and therefore suitable to the lede. I would argue that it should be restored.
  • I would also argue that the following is highly relevant to the lede and should be restored:

Scientific studies using its ratings note that ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check show high agreement with an independent fact checking dataset from 2017,[1] with NewsGuard[2] and with BuzzFeed journalists.[3]

  • Finally, the sentences about the Columbia Journalism Review seem to me to give undue weight to the point of being intentionally misleading. The statements made are from one op ed article, which reflects the views of its author "freelance journalist and researcher Tamar Wilner". They are not any sort of official statement of the Columbia Journalism Review, whch is how they are currently being presented. Further, they should be dated to indicate when they were made, 2018. I suggest returning that edit to the version that was given previously. MaryMO (AR) (talk) 12:40, 9 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the response, and thank you for finding the new refs. I agree that the lede should be changed to properly summarize what we decide to include in the article.
We should look at all the refs more carefully. I'm concerned that some of these references may be poor.
I see in the talk page history that @Thenightaway: made a case for including the Poynter ref, assuming it's the same one.
I don't believe the CJR piece is an op ed. Is it identified as such? --Hipal (talk) 17:25, 9 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
* You're right about my use of the term "op-ed" being incorrect, I've struck it for "article" above. I've also put back the two sections of the lede that we've agreed on. I'm going to try to get hold of the Albarracín book, to see the context in which they repeat the Tamar Wilner quote. I still think that implying that her comments represent the views of the Columbia Journalism Review is highly inappropriate. Many thanks, MaryMO (AR) (talk) 16:33, 13 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]
* BTW, do you have any idea of why the talk page history is archived the way it is? There don't seem to be a large number of comments, and they seem to be particularly hard to find. MaryMO (AR) (talk) 16:59, 13 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Weld was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Cite error: The named reference Broniatowski was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference Kiesel was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

"It has been used by both single- and cross-platform studies."[edit]

What does that mean and why is it worth noting in this article? --Hipal (talk) 17:25, 9 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • I've edited the article to better explain what this means and give an idea of why it is relevant. MaryMO (AR) (talk)

Removed from lede - SciReports 2020 ref[edit]

  • Chołoniewski, Jan; Sienkiewicz, Julian; Dretnik, Naum; Leban, Gregor; Thelwall, Mike; Hołyst, Janusz A. (2020). "A calibrated measure to compare fluctuations of different entities across timescales". Scientific Reports. 10 (1): 20673. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-77660-4. ISSN 2045-2322. PMC 7691371. PMID 33244096.

I'm not sure what to make of this ref, but using it in the lede with a quote seems very problematic.

  • The quote seemed to me to be a reasonable summation of what I was seeing overall in the article; yes, some people complain about it, but researchers use it in a bunch of ways.
The quote would be fine within the reference, but we should be summarizing in the lede. --Hipal (talk) 18:17, 16 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The authors are using MBFC as a source of information for their study. They briefly describe why they use it, with seven references. I assume that we're using all seven, but haven't checked yet. --Hipal (talk) 16:31, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

  • Chołoniewski is a nice ref to confirm that "Yes, lots of projects use this in a bunch of ways" but most of those references aren't cited in the Wikipedia article. I checked them; they do indicate that various researchers used MBFC's ratings in some way in their research. But I've only cited ones that say something interesting about the MBFC ratings (e.g. that they compared it with another dataset to validate it.) MaryMO (AR) (talk) 23:41, 15 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Idiosyncratic use of "left/right."[edit]

Should it be mentioned in the article that the organization's use of directional labels is based on an internal system and not on how these terms are generally used? I think that would be confusing and possibly misleading to a dangerous extent (e.g., by implying that far left and far right are more biased than left/right and center meaning "least biased," rather than left/right being a binary for the purposes of MBFC) since these terms are already a source of great confusion for people.

I'm not sure exactly how to do this without synthesis. 2603:7081:1603:A300:2462:26D6:EA74:20B6 (talk) 03:50, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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