The bot wasn’t assessing the individual articles. It was just pulling the rating from their website. If you look at the full reports on the website they have a section that discusses bias, and gives examples of things like loaded language found in the articles they assessed.
With your own reply you show that they have given you most of the information needed to make your own assessment. Like I’ve said other places in this thread, you don’t have to agree with them. I have never claimed they are correct. I’m saying that they provide information about how they arrived at their conclusion, you can assess that information and decide whether you agree.
It still stands that it is at least a reasonable place to look to gather basic information about a media source. And provides you with a solid starting point to research and make an assessment about a news source.
I agree that using the US political spectrum pretty significantly skews things since US politics is almost all center to right if you compare it to the wider spectrum globally. But since they gave their information, and what spectrum they are using it makes it pretty simple to get a baseline for most media outlets at a glance if it’s not one I’m familiar with.
And with the number of outright insane news sources people like to share, it’s useful to have a way to get at least a decent snapshot of what to expect.
MBFC doesn’t only count how factual something is. They very much look at inflammatory language like that, and grade a media outlet accordingly. It’s just not in the factual portion, it is in the bias portion. Which makes sense since, like you said, both stories can be factually accurate.
Why does any opinion get promoted on here? Because somebody posted it. And then there is a voting system and comments for people to express their agreement or disagreement.
I honestly don’t care either way if the bot exists. I just think it’s silly that people are claiming that MBFC is terrible based on basically nothing. You can disagree with how they define left vs right, or what their ratings are, but they are pretty transparent about how their system works. And no one has given any example of how it could be done better.
Consistently factual is exactly that. Both of those words mean actual things. And they go on to say that they can’t fail fact checks. And prompt corrections likely means that as a story develops, that if there were incorrect things reported, they are corrected as soon as the new information is available.
As for who defines extreme bias, it’s literally them. That is what they are saying they are doing. And they spell out what their left vs right criteria are. And how they judge it. Of course this is subjective. There isn’t really a way to judge the political spectrum without subjectivity. They do include examples in their reports about what biased language, sources, or reporting they found. Which allows you to easily judge whether you agree with it.
As for VOA, they say in the ownership portion that it is funded by the US government and that some view it as a propaganda source. They also discuss the history and purpose of it being founded. And then continue on with the factual accuracy and language analysis. You may not agree with it, but it is following their own methodology, and fully explained in the report.
Again, there isn’t anything saying you have to agree with them. It is a subjective rating. I’m not sure how much more transparent they can be though. They have spelled out how they grade, and each report provides explanations and examples that allow you to make your own judgments. Or a starting point for your own research.
If you can define a completely objective methodology to judge political bias on whatever spectrum you choose, then please do. It’s inherently subjective. And there isn’t really a way around that.
They cover what they consider left and right. This way you can judge whether it aligns with what you believe. And it allows you to interpret their results even if they don’t follow the same spectrum you do.
And if you know of a way to discuss political spectrum without subjectivity I would love to hear it. Even if you don’t use a 2d spectrum, it’s still subjective. Just subjective with additional criteria.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/left-vs-right-bias-how-we-rate-the-bias-of-media-sources/
There is definitely some subjectivity. Language isn’t something that is easily parsed and scored. That is why they give examples on the actual report about the kind of biased language they saw, or whatever other issues led to the score given.
I don’t think they mean for their website to be the end all bias resource. More of a stepping off point for you to make your own judgments.
They literally publish their methodology and scoring system.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/methodology/
So they do say exactly what their criteria is, and how it is scored. None of that is buzz words, it’s just a summary that fit in a few sentences. You can look at the full methodology if you want more than just that small bullet description.
I’m not saying that you have to agree with their scoring, or that it is necessarily accurate. I just think if you’re going to critique a thing, you should at least know what you’re critiquing.
Why do you say they’re opaque? They detail the history of the publication, the ownership, their analysis of bias within their reporting, and give examples of failed fact checks. I’m not sure what else you could want about how a publication is rated? I’m not saying it’s perfect, but they seem to be putting a solid effort into explaining how they arrive at the ratings they give.
Still worth it to try. Eventually maybe it will get some attention focused where it needs to be.
To add to that, if a church is lobbying or otherwise involved in the political process, they can be reported and lose their tax exempt status.
The balance has no reason to add up to 50. So there is no extra anything. If you kept spending 1 each row, and then summed the balance at the end, it would be massively higher than the 50 you started with.
Totally get that. And I’ve not been trying to push people to accept the bot, or saying that MBFC isn’t flawed. Mostly just trying to highlight the irony of some people having wildly biased views, and pushing factually incorrect info about a site aimed at scoring bias and factual accuracy.