And, that problem of starting from a super-slanted perspective bleeds into their assessment of “factual”. Outlets are dubbed as low factualness if they write true stories that make Israel look bad, if they then take the step of adding to them editorially “and that is why Israel is bad.”
And, the assessment of reliability is based on picking out randomly anecdotal individual articles / claims and then doing a very substandard job of assessing their truthfulness, so outlets that write a ton of stories or that report breaking stories or that have video content with free-form conversations can get randomly dinged for one dubious thing that someone said on a panel show, or one breaking story from 10 years ago that turned out not to be true in retrospect. Whereas an outlet like sciencetoday where every single article is just sort of half-assedly rewritten from some primary source usually with a few exaggerations or misleading framings in EVERY SINGLE ONE, is perfectly factual, because look, it’s based on a science paper, and those are never wrong.
And, yes, they’re trying to represent the US political spectrum where the NYT is “left center” but the US political spectrum is so badly tilted that half the stuff has fallen off the table and it’s not even possible to use it as a coherent scale at this point.
And they don’t rank some smaller outlets where it actually kind of would be useful to have a ranking, because that would be work
Wonder if it would be worth removing the “bias” tab altogether from the bot. Because it is clearly badly calculated, BBC as left wing etc.
The main issue is that the ranking is “calculated” in relation to the US left/right, which is shifted so far to the right compared to other countries.
Yup. Our Overton Window is dangling over the right edge of the political precipice.
And, that problem of starting from a super-slanted perspective bleeds into their assessment of “factual”. Outlets are dubbed as low factualness if they write true stories that make Israel look bad, if they then take the step of adding to them editorially “and that is why Israel is bad.”
And, the assessment of reliability is based on picking out randomly anecdotal individual articles / claims and then doing a very substandard job of assessing their truthfulness, so outlets that write a ton of stories or that report breaking stories or that have video content with free-form conversations can get randomly dinged for one dubious thing that someone said on a panel show, or one breaking story from 10 years ago that turned out not to be true in retrospect. Whereas an outlet like sciencetoday where every single article is just sort of half-assedly rewritten from some primary source usually with a few exaggerations or misleading framings in EVERY SINGLE ONE, is perfectly factual, because look, it’s based on a science paper, and those are never wrong.
And, yes, they’re trying to represent the US political spectrum where the NYT is “left center” but the US political spectrum is so badly tilted that half the stuff has fallen off the table and it’s not even possible to use it as a coherent scale at this point.
And they don’t rank some smaller outlets where it actually kind of would be useful to have a ranking, because that would be work
Other than that it’s a fine idea