No Stupid Questions
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The alternative is to use your own brain.
The fact that people are so often so ignorant and/or ideologically blinkered that they can't see plain bias when it's staring them in the face is the problem, and relying on a bot to tell you what to believe does not in any way, shape or form help to solve that problem. If anything, it makes it even worse.
Bias can be subtle and take work to suss out, especially if you're not familiar with the source.
After getting a credibility read of mediabiasfactcheck itself (which I've done only superficially for myself), it seems to be a potentially useful shortcut. And easy to block if it gets annoying.
The main problem that I see with MBFC, aside from the simple fact that it's a third party rather than ones own judgment (which is not infallible, but should still certainly be exercised, in both senses of the term) is that it appears to only measure factuality, which is just a tiny part of bias.
In spite of all of the noise about "fake news," very little news is actually fake. The vast majority of bias resides not in the nominal facts of a story, but in which stories are run and how they're reported - how those nominal facts are presented.
As an example, admittedly exaggerated for effect, compare:
with
Both relay the same basic facts, and it's likely that by MBFC's standards, both would be rated the same for that reason alone. But it's plain to see that the two are not even vaguely similar.
Again, exaggerated for effect.
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.
I haven't seen any evidence that it does that, and quite the contrary, evidence that it does not - examples from publications ranging from Israel Times to New York Times to Slate in which it accompanied an article with clearly loaded language with an assessment of high credibility.
It's possible that it's improved of late - I don't know, since I blocked it weeks ago, after a particularly egregious example of that accompanied a technically factually accurate but brazenly biased Israel Times article.
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.
Right, nor did I expect a rating based an on individual article - sorry if that's the way I made it sound.
It's simply that the rating of high credibility accompanying an article that was so obviously little more than a barrage of loaded language cast the problem into such sharp relief that I went from being unimpressed by MBFC to actively not wanting to see it.
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.