It pops up all the time, it’s a waste of time and I’m sure it has been used countless of times to discard some piece of information. It doesn’t add up anything productive to the comments, people who comment don’t even say anything they actually think they just “did you know that MBFC says this so it has to be truth?” I could go on but I think you get the idea.
Interesting comment
I have my biases, and I struggle reading most news sources because of theirs. Reading critically is very important and fact checks can help educate people on how to do that. Hopefully without picking up their biases.
So, people should waste time reading a source just because someone has a lot of energy flooding the zone so they can see what the real biases are?
Nothing you’ve said helps justify why adding more information is worse. People can still do your reading critically thing as well
I’m getting more suspicious of you after this emotional plea. What sorts sources are you upset have these comments, do you have some examples?
Because the additional information holds some random dipshits opinion on what is trustworthy and what not. When you see the “additional information” to show that something is trustworthy you read it uncritically
Oh wow. You believe trustworthy means you shouldn’t read something uncritically? What an interesting world you live in
Trustworthy by whose standards?
From Marx’s The German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas … The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”
You can’t just say “You believe trustworthy means you shouldn’t read something uncritically” when we are LITERALLY talking about what the nature of TRUST and FACT even is, and where people and institutions get their AUTHORITY from.
This is what I mean! You can’t even imagine a situation where a “media bias” site Isn’t BIASED and doesn’t skew their results based on that bias, resulting in the “additional information” CONTRIBUTING TO BIAS.
They all have bias and yet ARE THE ARBITER’S OF BIAS. Do you understand the contradiction now? They do nothing to help a person to be critical because they launder their authority, which is given to them by the uncritical masses, to distribute their bourgeois bias under the guise of neutrality!
There is a sense in which this is a correct statement, but I think simply saying this when talking to a liberal is unhelpful because it does not make apparent that this behavior of being “uncritical” isn’t the masses being “sheeple” (scare quotes, not quoting you), but them choosing to accept what affirms their ideology.
Yeah I struggled to find another way to phrase it, because even the idea of being critical is highly dependent on your perspective. You have to have a level of skepticism I think to even begin to be critical. Liberalism is constantly working to ensure that you never become skeptical of its own institutions or ideas. Deeply uncurious might be a more accurate way to say it, or passive consumers of media. The whole phenomenon of fact checking and media bias is rooted in things like Russiagate and Covid misinformation.
This idea of objective truth or empirical truth as applied to factuality in media attempts to collapse the realm of what is possible or to narrow the scope of reality. Its attached to liberal obsession with institutions and ideas and their infallibility. Take the the Washington Post. Media Bias Fact Check says it has a LEFT-CENTER BIAS. Meanwhile, you have Jeff Bazos preventing them from endorsing a candidate and then saying their opinion pages will “defend free market and ‘personal liberties’”. But liberals will not recall that, they’ve probably forgotten these things even happened. To them WaPo isn’t a conservative rag so its good. Even the idea of what is Left is part of the ruling ideas. Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Anarchism, are all regulated to fringe status, deeply equated with fascism to dilute their character, with the goal of excluding them from the “Left” category, which is how you arrive at “LEFT-CENTER BIAS”.
I think the issue is that to a general audience it’s something that you can’t just say in passing with a noun phrase without establishing that you’re talking about this bias first, but if I had to produce a phrase then it would probably be “the less-politically-educated” or something, since obviously there are lots of people with political education who are contributing to problems in The Discourse, but the people who just hold up MBFC like it’s a cross to repel the vampire of radicalism are, in my opinion, mostly the kind of people who have very little political education and just consume a lot of corporate news or NYT (or some equivalent). The ones with an education will more consistently present (hackneyed) arguments or actual articles.
I could be wrong though, it’s just the impression I get.
This is my default position, that it is biased. All of your comments are doing an amazing job of projecting some views you’ve decided I believe onto me. And being pretty longwinded to try to make a point
Yes i believe the majority of people that assume something is declared trustworthy read it uncritically. If you read my other comment it’s easier to assume everything is not trustworthy, so it forces you to read it critically. What an naive world you live in to not see this
I don’t think the obvious insinuation is fair to you, but I want to point out that this is an extremely funny turn of phrase.
Speaking of unfair, I don’t think this comment is either. Calling that comment an “emotional plea” worth raising your suspicions is absurd. There’s not even that much of an emotional affectation and certainly there is no appeal to emotion in place of a valid argument. What is “emotional”? That you can infer he has a feeling on the subject? Come on. Furthermore, RedWizard is an upstanding guy from everything I’ve seen of him, and I think it’s just that some of us are really sick of MBFC tacitly question-begging the center being unbiased and people in some spaces always using it to attack anything source left of CNN, a behavior we’ve watched or been subjected to for several years now.
Trying to explain it in terms of how you frame things: You are right when you said elsewhere that people only have so much time to read through various sources, so polluting the space with something that has been long established to be bullshit is detrimental to having more people come to more reasonable conclusions, and this is something that I’m sure you would agree to if it was a source that you really accepted at least that level of criticism for (e.g. it would be a negative for the site to get a deluge of links to flat Earth websites). That is why “adding more information is worse.” If it’s about putting something in an archive, then by all means put whatever you like in the archive so we have it for reference, but for these sorts of fleeting discussions, it is obviously harmful.
To be clear though, I don’t support banning it on the basis that the liberals who fancy that .ml is oppressing them are already so annoying and this would give them another thing to make constant complaints about. I think we should just have a bot response tagged on to comments that link to the site.
Edit: RW does make more emotional comments elsewhere, but again not appealing to emotion, so I don’t think the criticism rises above the most absurd of tone-policing.
Fair. I think I say something similar in my “lemmy.ml” post that was a bit harsh / blunt: I get why this community wouldn’t like media bias. I didn’t expand to say that the spectrum they view the world through (I’m painting with a broad brush here and assuming how capitalist something is) isn’t in the media bias website and a bunch of sources they trust are flagged as unreasonable. I also say its not a community I particularly enjoy so I’ll be off
Yeah, emotional was the wrong word although, like your edit gets at, it might apply to later comments. I’m about to leave the conversation but something like a preaching continued push might be closer. I’m lazy to reread the thread properly, I’m sure I have enough faults in it too
But, the raising suspicions is fair. It was a continued push of someone towards a viewpoint, very quick to presume my views, on recycled arguments and that is usually for me pretty suspicious
So between your initial, completely spurious accusation, this:
Which might otherwise be called a “campaign” or just “something this person believes in and argues for”
Which, without proper refutation (and you have no proper refutation, see how you replied to me ~four times but could never give me a defense of the site), might just be “a reasonable argument that people repeat because it’s reasonable and has yet to be refuted” and similarly, in one of your other replies:
Which, again, could simply be that many of us have years of experience or Redditors/Ledditors posting that stupid website as an argument and you’d probably say the same thing if it was a website that supported flat earth theory, which is literally no less ridiculous than the claim that its individual ratings are based on, that being centrist is inherently less biased (which it literally does, see davel’s comment).
All this taken together is hard to read as anything other than you posing yourself as some intellectually rigorous figure that looks down upon the cult/herd that you see here, but in reality you have been clambering for literally any excuse you can find to discount arguments out of hand, to say that what I and others say simply “doesn’t count,” to avoid actually taking the arguments on their own merits. Despite your meaningless and sometimes wildly inaccurate complaints about emotionality, you certainly aren’t shy about your own affectation, as in where you said something like:
So, self-victimizing aside, this absurd standard about emotionality is clearly not something that you actually believe in, it’s just a crass rhetorical cudgel that you use to defend your biases about this sort of media from being fact-checked. If only we had a website that dealt with that subject . . .
As in “You can read critically but for me, fuck that” is pretty funny to interject into this conversation? I almost edited it to be clearer and closer to “People can and do still read critically, you know that set of words people seem to be latching onto with questionable usage”