Where to get your news

Look at the new mod, already stirring things up!

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Here's why it's important to be discerning when it comes to your news sources. There was a dispute between CNN's Jim Acosta and White House advisor Stephen Miller the other day. It was covered very, very differently by slanted news sources. Note - I don't follow or get news from any of these sources, and a person interested in facts shouldn't either.

How the Right and Left reacted to Acosta-Miller

CNN's Jim Acosta and top White House advisor Stephen Miller got into a shouting match at the daily press briefing on Wednesday, and partisan media quickly took sides.

Why it matters: This fight is just one more vivid example of the ongoing war between the Trump administration and main stream media as well as the vicious partisanship surrounding the Trump presidency. As usual, left-leaning media sites rushed to praise Jim Acosta as a hero and criticize Stephen Miller, while right-leaning media companies ran headlines mocking Acosta or cheering on Miller.
Headlines 151 words

Here are some headlines from right-leaning and left-leaning news sites on the Acosta-Miller brawl.
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Zoogs posted this in the MEDIA BIAS- FACT CHECKING THREAD BY IA STATE HUSKER. MODS - MAYBE YOU CAN MERGE THAT THREAD INTO THIS ONE??

It looks that way, but it's not. Ultimately this is one guy who came up with a system and made a website for it. I have reservations about someone willing to look that scientific, throwing up numbers and references and graphs, and ending with the admission that this is just his own non-scientific methodology. It has to be inadequate if CNN and Drudge Report are just two sides of the same coin.

Their methodology page seems like more of a marketing speech than anything else. For something that's so comprehensive-looking, it clearly is not ("For each source a minimum of 10 headlines are reviewed and a minimum of 5 news stories reviewed"). There's no accountability here very few outlets have bothered to cover him (Dave Van Zandt, who is...who, exactly?) The ones who have that I've found fall into two categories: 1) mainstream sources carelessly listing "Here's some factcheck websites, go check them out" and 2) fringe websites loudly complaining about their review (while potentially making a fair point). By any reasonable metric I think this source itself would be categorized as unreliable.

For other stuff in the same category:

Here's one chart (source: patent attorney Vanessa Otero)

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Here's another one, from some guy on Twitter who evidently sees Vox and Breitbart as mirror images, and RT as basically The Hill:

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Here's one on science reporting from some official-sounding sources that I haven't vetted at all (just take it as a blogger writing for that site making a graphic):

ACSH-RCS%20infographic%20v8.jpg


Just for fun, here's one from Infowars because anybody can play this game:

MW-FC099_mapnew_20161215125829_NS.jpg


I think all of these are quite flawed in their own way. I think I found the patent attorney one more fair than most; it seems mostly fair about analytical depth and puts the crazy where it belongs. But more than anything I think it's important to avoid taking any of these chart-makers as gospel.

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AllSides looks far more legitimate as an organization, although to be fair, that also doesn't say too much about the quality of their methodology. It is (or was) a startup.

THIS IS FROM IA STATE HUSKER FROM HIS MEDIA BIAS THREAD



  • Posted 26 June 2017 - 10:47 AM


    https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

    I stumbled accross this site, and wanted to share it with the community. It appears to be a community-reviewed or public-reviewed site that provides ratings for media sources. It looks pretty legitimate, but anything open to internet polling can be manipulated. What do you all think of the accuracy of it? Here is a quick breakdown of some of the more major news outlets (there are numerous outlets in their ratings. I'm just listing those I consider major because I have heard of them)

    Red = Mixed Record on factual reporting

    Black = High rating on factual reporting

    Green = Very High rating on factual reporting

    Left Bias

    CNN*

    Daily Beast

    Huffington Post

    MSNBC*

    New Yorker

    Left-Center

    ABC News

    Al Jazeera

    AOL

    The Atlantic

    BBC

    Bloomberg

    CBS News

    CNBC

    NBC News

    Newsweek

    NPR

    New York Times

    Politico

    The Guardian

    The Hill*

    Time Mag

    US News World Report

    Washington Post

    Yahoo News*

    Least Biased

    Associated Press

    C-Span

    Gallup

    Pew Research

    Politifact

    Reuters

    The Economist

    USA Today

    Wikipedia

    Right-Center

    Des Moines Register

    Forbes*

    New York Post*

    Omaha World Herald

    Wall Street Journal

    Right Bias

    Breitbart*

    Daily Mail*

    Drudge Report*

    Fox News*
 
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mediabiasfactcheck.com is about as accurate as me posting my opinions on various news sites. The guy running it uses no scientific methodology and has been accused of biasing his "ratings" based on criticism of his site.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-20/exposing-9-fakest-fake-news-checkers

EDIT - I also noticed something on the InfoWars graphic: Look who's missing from their chart (because they would be at the bottom left)

TGHusker said:
Just for fun, here's one from Infowars because anybody can play this game:

MW-FC099_mapnew_20161215125829_NS.jpg
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Ironically, that's from ZeroHedge, which is as conspiratorial a a site as they come.

It's not even from ZeroHedge, actually -- it's from WND. Which if anything is even more low-grade.

But then, here's the thing: of course they would protest, but they're not wrong about this.

 
Yeah, I saw the irony in posting from those two sources. But there are several sites questioning the legitimacy of mediabiasfactcheck - zerohedge just happened to be the first one I grabbed a link from.

 
knapplc said:
Yeah, I saw the irony in posting from those two sources. But there are several sites questioning the legitimacy of mediabiasfactcheck - zerohedge just happened to be the first one I grabbed a link from.
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Knapp - I'm disappointed in you - that is something I use to always do!! Just joking wt you. Good info on the above.

 
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/the-alt-right-and-glenn-greenwald-versus-h-r-mcmaster.html

NYMag with a great review of The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald's curious alliance with the alt-right and Russia. Greenwald and his outlet do and have done valuable work, but on this particular topic their posture has always been mystifying to me. This closing paragraph is a succinct summary, and one with which I agree.

This closely tracks the Trump legal team’s own defense of the Russia scandal, a fact that is probably coincidental. (There are only so many arguments to make.) Greenwald is not a racist, and is the opposite of a nationalist, and yet his worldview has brought him into close alignment with that of the alt-right. A Greenwaldian paranoid would see this quasi-alliance as a conspiracy. The reality of his warped defenses of Trump is merely that of a monomaniac unable to relinquish his obsessions.
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Posting in this thread because it seems as good a place as any to exchange our views on different outlets, journalists, etc. I still think Greenwald is a valuable voice and his criticism is worthy. Yet I find this alignment of his impossible to deny, hard to accept, and well-deserving of this kind of rebuke.

 
zoogs said:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/the-alt-right-and-glenn-greenwald-versus-h-r-mcmaster.html

NYMag with a great review of The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald's curious alliance with the alt-right and Russia. Greenwald and his outlet do and have done valuable work, but on this particular topic their posture has always been mystifying to me. This closing paragraph is a succinct summary, and one with which I agree.

This closely tracks the Trump legal team’s own defense of the Russia scandal, a fact that is probably coincidental. (There are only so many arguments to make.) Greenwald is not a racist, and is the opposite of a nationalist, and yet his worldview has brought him into close alignment with that of the alt-right. A Greenwaldian paranoid would see this quasi-alliance as a conspiracy. The reality of his warped defenses of Trump is merely that of a monomaniac unable to relinquish his obsessions.
Click to expand...
Posting in this thread because it seems as good a place as any to exchange our views on different outlets, journalists, etc. I still think Greenwald is a valuable voice and his criticism is worthy. Yet I find this alignment of his impossible to deny, hard to accept, and well-deserving of this kind of rebuke.
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That NYMag article misconstrues (or at least misunderstands) Greenwald's article as he's not supporting Trump but rather attacking the establishment. Greenwald's closing paragraphs sum up his argument (emphasis mine):

No matter how much of a threat one regards Trump as being, there really are other major threats to U.S. democracy and important political values. It’s hard, for instance, to imagine any group that has done more harm, and ushered in more evil, than the Bush-era neocons with whom Democrats are now openly aligning. And who has brought more death, and suffering, and tyranny to the world over the last six decades than the U.S. national security state?

In terms of some of the popular terms that are often thrown around these days — such as “authoritarianism” and “democratic norms” and “U.S. traditions” — it’s hard to imagine many things that would pose a greater threat to all of that than empowering the national security state (what, before Trump, has long been called the Deep State) to exert precisely the power that is supposed to be reserved exclusively for elected officials. In sum, Trump opponents should be careful of what they wish for, as it might come true.
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I don't think it was saying that Greenwald is supporting Trump -- it goes to lengths to repeatedly point out that he doesn't. It's spotlighting the extent to which Greenwald buys into the same sort of arguments in a critique of his rigidly America-critical worldview. That worldview in itself is not necessarily a wrong thing, but IMO it's led to some truly bizarre stances from him. Most stark among these examples is his defense of the Trump Jr. meeting. There are resolute critics of the national security apparatus and the Obama administration's record in this area who don't share what looks to me like Greenwald's barely believable blind spot. If the NY Mag author shared in Greenwald's extremely suspicious nature, only regarding Russophiles instead of neocons, he would condemn him as an incontrovertible co-conspirator -- and yet he does not.

In short: I share the "question the establishment" sympathies, but there's a long bridge between that and where Greenwald and The Intercept are on Russia, and I'm loathe to join them there.

 
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zoogs said:
I don't think it was saying that Greenwald is supporting Trump -- it goes to lengths to repeatedly point out that he doesn't. It's spotlighting the extent to which Greenwald buys into the same sort of arguments in a critique of his rigidly America-critical worldview. That worldview in itself is not necessarily a wrong thing, but IMO it's led to some truly bizarre stances from him. Most stark among these examples is his defense of the Trump Jr. meeting. There are resolute critics of the national security apparatus and the Obama administration's record in this area who don't share what looks to me like Greenwald's barely believable blind spot. If the NY Mag author shared in Greenwald's extremely suspicious nature, only regarding Russophiles instead of neocons, he would condemn him as an incontrovertible co-conspirator -- and yet he does not.

In short: I share the "question the establishment" sympathies, but there's a long bridge between that and where Greenwald and The Intercept are on Russia, and I'm loathe to join them there.
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When you say "NYMag with a great review of The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald's curious alliance with the alt-right and Russia" and the article says "the episode has revealed a left-winger’s idiosyncratic sympathy for the most odious characters on the right" that sounds an awful lot like claiming Greenwald supports Trump or at least supports the alt-right.

If you're going to disagree with Greenwald and debunk his claims, then that's fine. But to suggest that his claims are debunked simply because alt-right people similar claims isn't true. (FYI, I don't quite buy Greenwald's claims, but I think they are worth keeping in mind.)

 
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