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.
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