He/Him

Sneaking all around the fediverse.

Also at breakfastmtm@fedia.social breakfastmtn@pixelfed.social

  • 459 Posts
  • 290 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: October 4th, 2023

help-circle



  • No, if there were serious, pervasive bias impacting scores, it would lower the correlation and MBFC would be an outlier in the group because they would be in agreement less. If something’s happening at such a low level that it doesn’t impact correlation, it’s just an outlier. Multiple researchers conclude that the differences between monitors is too low to impact downstream analysis which is hard to square with your claim. And, each entry represents about 0.01% of their content, so what percentage of that data is being used to draw sweeping conclusions about the whole?

    There is just high agreement about what constitutes high and low quality news sites. The notion that MBFC is somehow inferior to other bias monitors or extremely biased is not supported by evidence. If one of those organizations is better than the others, it isn’t much better. As this study concludes, because the level of agreement between them is so high, it doesn’t really matter which one you use. They’re all fine. Even they think so. Not only do MBFC ratings correlate nearly perfectly with Newsguard, Newsguard’s rating of MBFC is a perfect score. They’re well-respected by each other.

    And, really, how could these researchers who’ve dedicated their lives to understanding this stuff have gotten it so wrong? Academia definitely isn’t a hotbed of conservatism. Using awful tools could destroy their careers but MBFC is regularly used in research. Why? How are these studies getting through peer-review? How are they getting published? There are just too many failure points required.


  • From the JPost article:

    Two articles published in the last few days were part of the IDF investigation, one from Jewish Chronicle and one from the German tabloid newspaper Bild. Both have claimed to reveal internal and top secret documents of Hamas, supposedly straight from Yahya Sinwar’s computer.

    Not the NYT. Not sure how the Times gets painted with that brush for not publishing based on those documents. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I guess.

    Your claim about the sexual violence article is also not true. The NYT spent a month re-reporting that story which didn’t result in a single correction. Their reporting is also supported by a UN investigation that concluded that there “are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence — including rape and gang-rape — occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery during the attacks on 7 October 2023.” I don’t think you can accuse the UN of collaborating with the IDF.

    From this article:

    The Times assessed the documents’ authenticity by sharing some of their contents with members of and experts close to Hamas. Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, a Hamas member and a former fighter in its military wing who is now an analyst based in Istanbul, said that he was familiar with some of the details described in the documents and that keeping organized notes was consistent with the group’s general practices. A Palestinian analyst with knowledge of Hamas’s inner workings, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive topics, also confirmed certain details as well as general structural operations of Hamas that aligned with the documents.

    The Israeli military, in a separate internal report obtained by The Times, concluded the documents were real and represented another failure by intelligence officials to prevent the Oct. 7 attack. The Times also researched details mentioned in the meeting records to check that they corresponded with actual events.



  • You’re wrong. Tons of peer-reviewed research says you’re wrong. There just isn’t any that says you’re right.

    Do you have an explanation for why this bias you claim is so pervasive cannot be found when anyone looks for it? Is it… paranormal bias? Is it just really shy bias that hides when it gets scared?

    How can that be true and MBFC be in broad consensus across thousands of news sites with different tools from academics, journalists, and other bias monitoring organizations? Both things cannot be true. In fact, whenever someone compares MBFC to any other resource they find almost perfect correlation, not bias. I’d love for you to explain to me where that bias disappears to when under a microscope.

    Is there a conspiracy between bias monitoring organizations, journalists, and academics you have evidence of? Are the prestigious journals that published them in on it too? I can’t wait to sketch out this vast global conspiracy to pull the wool over our eyes and convince us that Democracy Now is just… highly factual. Those bastards!



  • Aside from the extremely vocal minority who seek it out to downvote it and complain about it constantly, it does seem like people don’t care about it when they don’t need it and appreciate it when they do. Very unscientific observation but obscure sources usually seem to have more upvotes. It doesn’t need to be useful to everyone all the time to have value.

    Having quick access to MBFC and Wiki links is great and useful for mods, I assume. I also like that it carves out a thread to discuss sources. Replying to the bot makes it seem much less like you’re attacking the OP, which I always hated pre-bot.















  • You:

    I’m not buying the fact that Israel has no plans to settle Lebanon

    I’m not selling that.

    I’m not commenting on Israeli intentions in Lebanon. I’m not defending Israel or their aims. I’m just commenting on one small thing:

    Is Israel advertising property for sale in Lebanon?

    And they aren’t.

    I’m not trying to convince you that it has some big implication for their intentions in Lebanon. It doesn’t. They just aren’t advertising property for sale in Lebanon. Whatever Israel’s intentions are, that claim is false.




  • Sure. First, is that an advertisement for property? No, it isn’t. The statement that it’s advertising property is false. It’s political propaganda designed to look like an advertisement.

    The state of Israel and political groups within that state are different entities. When the Proud Boys release some vile statement, I’m sure someone, somewhere is like “OMG look what the US is doing!” But the Proud Boys and the US state are different entities, even if the Proud Boys reside within the US state. Even if there are US officials whose values align closely with those chuds.

    The comment I replied to was wrong about both who was speaking and what they were saying.

    Is there some way that ‘The state of Israel is advertising property for sale in Lebanon’ is a true statement?














  • According to the joint statement, they will now “be taking immediate steps to cancel bilateral air services agreements with Iran,” and work towards sanctioning Iran Air, the country’s flag carrier.

    “Entities and individuals involved with Iran’s ballistic missile program and the transfer of ballistic missiles and other weapons to Russia” will also face sanctions.

    . . .

    The U.K. released a statement detailing which Iranian individuals and organizations had been sanctioned by both London and Washington.

    These include Brigadier General Seyed Hamzeh Ghalandari, the Iranian Defense Ministry’s director general for international relations, Second Brigadier General Ali Jafarabadi, the head of the Space Command of Iran’s Aerospace Force, and Majid Mousavi, Deputy Commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

    The U.K. also announced sanctions on five Russian cargo ships “for their role in transporting military supplies from Iran to Russia.”


  • Wikipedia

    This paper has a sketchy history. It’s based in Moscow and not listed as a foreign agent. openDemocracy reports here on their history of publishing pro-Kremlin, pro-Putin nonsense. When 5 senior editors quit in response and started another paper, they were immediately labelled “foreign agents”. This is propaganda. Check this uncritical trash about teaching students “media literacy” by depending on the state propaganda network:

    The main meaning of the classes is to introduce schoolchildren to TASS as the main state news agency of the country, a source of reliable information about Russia and the world, follows from the scenarios of the classes. The Agency sets itself the task of “protecting the informational boundaries of the country and the truth, which is very often tried and trying to take away,” said Andrei Kondrashov, TASS Director General. In order to become a journalist, it is necessary to “Homeland to love” and be inquisitive, he concluded. (autotranslated)