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Israel bombs Greek Orthodox Gaza church sheltering displaced people
(www.aljazeera.com)
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
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Sure, but what differentiates "propaganda" from media that simply falls outside of the Western Overton window? Given the absolutely terrible coverage we've had of the Palestine-Israel conflict from supposedly "reliable" and "factual" Western sources (among other instances), it's hard to argue that the Western Overton window represents "reality" so much as it represents "what's acceptable."
Do you get a boner every time you mention the Western Overton window?
Yes
You said Overton window, please put an NSFW tag on this. I was on the train and when I saw this I had to start furiously masterbating. Everyone else gave me strange looks and were saying things like “what the fuck” and “call the police”. I dropped my phone and everyone around me saw this comment. Now there is a whole train of men masterbating together at this one comment. This is all your fault, you could have prevented this if you had just tagged this post NSFW.
That's actually what we're discussing right now. There are a number of sites that rank media bias, we're deciding which ones to use and what the threshhold is for cutting off a source.
I don't want to be in a position of removing a link because the source "makes me feel icky", I need to be able to point to a demonstrable metric that says "Yeah, doesn't meet our bias standards."
Bias standards are also widely different depending on the topic covered. For example, Al Jazeera is well-known for not criticizing the Qatari government, but that doesn't invalidate their reporting of international issues. Similarly, the bandwagoning that happens when certain American media outlets cover international news doesn't invalidate their reporting of domestic issues. I don't think bias is a very good metric for assessing news sources so much as facts are. If a paper reports all the facts, verifies those facts, but puts their own spin on it, that's valid reporting. If a paper just grabbed a Reuters wire or official government statement without verifying the details, that's not really reporting at all.
We've seen that shockingly often: in the case of the Indian moon landing, good chunks of American media was using the headline "India lands on the South Pole" despite being 21 degrees off because Reuters said so. In the case of the supposedly beheaded babies, those same chunks of America media used the headline "40 babies beheaded" and cited a single IDF source that wasn't supported by the statements of journalists on the ground. Moreover, in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, depending on whether you read AFU or MoD reports, you could have entirely different opinions of the war (both reports are almost certainly wrong).
There's a problem much greater than that of spreading "biased content" and that's the one of spreading misinformation or unsubstantiated/poorly substantiated claims. I think it's the responsibility of moderators of a community to police the latter first and to allow the community to attempt to form consensus on the former. It might be good to keep track of the record of different news outlets as well (e.g. when later news reveals that previous reports were inaccurate, to determine how often news sources "jump the gun" and report claims with poor evidence). Skewing facts is the entire purpose of reporting, but making shit up or citing government claims as fact show laziness and a lack of journalistic integrity.
FWIW, most sites which rank media bias and factual reporting evaluate it from a Western perspective. As has been pretty well-established by various UN resolutions (e.g. the recognition of Palestine), the world does not consist solely of the West and world news should not consist solely of Western news outlets. Even as a Canadian (and most definitely in the West), some of the "centrist, unbiased" American sources sound like loony right-wing warhawks and some of the "centrist, unbiased" European sources are extremely racist. People in the rest of the world do exist and claiming that they don't know any better than the enlightened West is, frankly, racist.
tl;dr I think policing bias before policing misinformation is putting the cart way before the horse. As a community focusing on world news, it should actually consider perspectives from around the world.