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.
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.