MBFC

Bias Rating: RIGHT-CENTER; Factual Reporting: HIGH; Country: United Kingdom; MBFC Credibility Rating: HIGH CREDIBILITY)

Wiki

The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain’s quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as The New Observer. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK (formerly News International), which is owned by News Corp. Times Newspapers also publishes The Times.

In their own words:

Novaya Gazeta Europe was founded in April 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine six weeks earlier and the subsequent introduction of wartime censorship that forced most of Novaya Gazeta’s editors and journalists to leave the country.

Based in the Latvian capital Riga, Novaya Gazeta Europe seeks to continue the legacy of Novaya Gazeta, which has been one of the most trusted names in Russian independent journalism for over 30 years.

Confirmed by Wikipedia. No MBFC or AllSides rating, though their Wiki page lists numerous awards they’ve won. There are many articles about the Russian government shutting them down after the invasion. Here’s one from Reuters. Many of their journalists have been murdered by Putin’s regime. Anna Politkovskaya’s murder is maybe the most infamous.

Wikipedia

Hey buddy bot, et al. This source has a pretty narrow focus – investigative journalism in central Europe – and that’s probably why they don’t have fact or bias checks. They’re published by and funded through an investigative journalism non-profit though. The author and collaborating journalists are well-known and have either won or been shortlisted for many awards for their work.

At least in the case of ‘The Spot News’, I don’t think that’s what they are and I think it’s giving them more legitimacy than they deserve. I don’t believe it’s a genuine effort to do reporting. They’re posing as a news agency when they’re just reposting stuff they find online. Even in that tweet, they’re reposting a video as if it’s their own.

There are a million of these grifty accounts/sites that claim to be ‘The World’s #1 Source for Global Breaking News’. Two people and a camera can do a lot of things, but they can’t be that. The people and the camera can only be in one place at a time, right?

In just the last 12 hours, The Spot News have “covered” Aerosmith, an attack on Israel, Imane Khelif (with this scummy nugget: “Imane Khelif, who has male hormones and beats women, took refuge in Allah.”), a Kirill Fedorov interview with a Russian soldier, bird-shaped Chinese drones, Eylem Tok’s lawyer, and a Ukrainian attack on a Russian sub. That’s quite the travel budget for a little operation out of Sheridan, Wyoming! They don’t indicate who their “reporters” are. There isn’t one human being associated with that account. These are all hallmarks of news grifters. What they’re really doing is plagiarism.

‘Ukraine News 24’ doesn’t make any big claims about being the world’s top news source and, honestly, I’m not totally sure that they’re even trying to claim that they’re doing journalism even though they’ve identified themselves as a “media and news company.” It seems more like news activism and 99% of what they seem to do is curate and amplify news about Ukraine (with attribution). There’s no problem at all with them doing that. They don’t seem to do any original reporting though. I was too harsh in equating those two but I think pointing out that they’re not really a news org is appropriate because their name is kind of deceptive (intentionally or not).

They don’t have an MBFC page, which is a bit weird since according to their Wikipedia page they’ve been around for 26 years. I couldn’t find any bias rating info on them anywhere.

The story seems a bit sketchy. IntelliNews attributes the video to Jason Jay Smart – a political consultant and writer for the Kyiv Post. The video didn’t originate with him though. About 6 hours earlier it was posted by ‘The Spot News’ who are probably a fake news organization*. They don’t seem to have a web presence beyond that twitter account. Spot News was used as the source for this article from Defense-Blog that pre-dates the IntelliNews piece.

The earliest post with the video I can find is here from ‘Ukraine News 24 Hours’, who are also not really a news org and just link to a telegram account. They claim that they posted it but, who knows? Most references to the video describe it as “appearing online” without any attribution, which itself is a bit sketch. No one really reputable is reporting this (yet?).

• Edit: by “fake news organization” I mean that they are not a real news organization, not that they are necessarily posting fake news (though they could be!)

This is only true specifically when you’re thinking about it as a great source can’t have its credibility rating lowered. A not great factual source can get a high credibility rating if it’s deemed centrist enough which again is arbitrary based on the (effectively) 1 guys personal opinion.

The impact either way is slight. I’m sure you could find a few edge cases you could make an argument about because no methodology is perfect, but each outlier represents a vanishingly small (~0.01%) amount of their content. When you look at rigorous research on the MBFC dataset though, the effect just isn’t really there. Here’s another study that concludes that the agreement between bias-monitoring organizations is so high that it doesn’t matter which one you use. I’ve looked and I can’t find research that finds serious bias or methodological problems. Looking back at the paper I posted in my last comment, consensus across thousands of news organizations is just way too high to be explainable by chance. If it was truly arbitrary as people often argue, MBFC would be an outlier. If all the methodologies were bad, the results would be all over the map because there are many more ways to make a bad methodology than a good one. What the research says is that if one methodology is better than the others, it isn’t much better.

Again, I think you make a really good argument for why MBFC and sites like it shouldn’t be used in an extreme, heavy-handed way. But it matters if it has enough precision for our purposes. Like, if I’m making bread, I don’t need a scale that measures in thousandths of a gram. A gram scale is fine. I could still churn out a top-shelf loaf with a scale that measures in 10-gram units. This bot is purely informational. People are reacting like it’s a moderation change but it isn’t – MBFC continues to be one resource among many that mods use to make decisions. Many react as though MBFC declares a source either THE BEST or THE WORST (I think a lot of those folks aren’t super great with nuance) but what it mostly does is say ‘this source is fine but there’s additional info or context worth considering.’ Critics often get bent out of shape about the ranking but almost universally neglect the fact that, if you click that link, there’s a huge report on each source that provides detailed info about their ownership history, funding model, publishing history, biases, and the press freedom of the country they’re in. Almost every time, there are reasonable explanations for the rankings in the report. I have not once ever seen someone say, like, ‘MBFC says that this is owned by John Q. Newspaperman but it’s actually owned by the Syrian government,’ or ‘they claim that they had a scandal with fabricated news but that never happened’. Is there a compelling reason why we’re worse off knowing that information? If you look at the actual reports for Breitbart and the Kyiv Independent, is there anything in there that we’re better off not knowing?

Got rebuttals for any of my criticisms about the methodology?

I do!

I think the importance of American bias is overstated. What matters is that they’re transparent about it. That bias also impacts the least important thing they track. People often fixate on that metric when it has little impact on other metrics or on the most important question for this community: ‘how likely is it that this source is telling the truth?’ Left and right are relative terms that change drastically over time and space. They even mean different things at local and national levels within the same country. It’s not really an MBFC problem, it’s a the-world-is-complicated problem that isn’t easily solved. And it’s not like they’re listing far-right publications as far-left. Complaints are almost always like, “this source is center not center-left!” It’s small problems in the murky middle that shouldn’t be surprising or unexpected.

It’s also capturing something that happens more at the extremes where publications have additional goals beyond news reporting. Ignoring Fox’s problem with facts/misinfo, it doesn’t really bother me that they’re penalized for wanting to both report the news and promote a right-wing agenda. Promoting an agenda and telling the truth are often in conflict (note Fox’s problem with facts/misinfo). CBC News, for example, probably should have a slightly higher score for having no agenda beyond news reporting.

It might matter more if it impacted the other metrics, but it doesn’t really. Based on MBFC’s methodology, it’s actually impossible for editorial bias alone to impact the credibility rating without having additional problems – you can lose a max 2 points for bias, but must lose 5 to be rated “medium credibility”. I don’t know why FAIR is rated highly factual (and I’d love for them to be a bit more transparent about it) but criticizing bias leading to them being rated both highly factual and highly credible feels like less than a death blow. If it’s a problem, it seems like a relatively small one.

MBFC also isn’t an outlier compared to other organizations. This study looked at 6 bias-monitoring organizations and found them basically in consensus across thousands of news sites. If they had a huge problem with bias, it’d show in that research.

On top of that, none of this impacts this community at all. It could be a problem if the standard here was ‘highest’ ratings exclusively, but it isn’t. And no one’s proposing that it should be. I post stories from the Guardian regularly without a problem and they’re rated mixed factual and medium credibility for failing a bunch of fact checks, mostly in op-ed (And I think the Guardian is a great, paywall-less paper that should fact check a bit better).

So I think the things you point out are well buffered by their methodology and by not using the site in a terrible, draconian way.

The Intercept getting only a “mostly factual” rating (3rd highest) despite their admittance it has never failed a fact check.

This is literally in bold at the top of the page:

Overall, we rate The Intercept progressive Left Biased based on story selection that routinely favors the left. We also rate them as Mostly Factual in reporting rather than High due to previous fabricated work and censorship of writers.

Fabricated work.

Is there anything that’s more of a capital crime in journalism than fabricating quotes? Surely we can all agree that publishing fiction as news is the opposite of factual reporting? They may not have failed a fact check in the last five years but it just isn’t possible for them to have published fabricated news without ever failing at least one. By their own admission they failed five in that incident alone.

Because? You’re angry that they have a methodology? You’re angry that they’re basing it on the paper as a whole and not solely on their coverage of Gaza?

Because they’re in agreement with you. When someone posts a Jerusalem Post story about Gaza, MBFC is saying “this source is heavily biased toward the Israeli government.” Even if their coverage is factual, you’re not getting the full context of what’s happening in the conflict.

Thanks for this!

Edit: And happy cake day!

yet according to MBFC they’re near perfect

Here are some quotes from the link you posted:

They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appealing to emotion or stereotypes) to favor conservative causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information but may require further investigation.

After Conrad Black acquired the paper, its political position changed to right-leaning, when Black began hiring conservative journalists and editors. Eli Azur is the current owner of Jerusalem Post. According to Ynetnews, and a Haaretz article, “Benjamin Netanyahu, the Editor in Chief,” in 2017, Azur gave testimony regarding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pressure. Current Editor Yaakov Katz was the former senior policy advisor to Naftali Bennett, the former Prime Minister and head of the far-right political party, “New Right.”

During the 2023 Israel-Hamas conflict, the majority of stories favored the Israeli government, such as this Netanyahu to Hezbollah: If you attack, we’ll turn Beirut into Gaza. In general, the Jerusalem Post holds right-leaning editorial biases and is usually factual in reporting.

Overall, we rate The Jerusalem Post Right-Center biased based on editorial positions that favor the right-leaning government. We also rate them Mostly Factual for reporting, rather than High due to two failed fact checks.

Based on MBFC’s methodology, they can’t have more than 6 points (out of 10) toward credibility, which is the floor for high credibility. They’re one lost point from being listed as a medium credibility source, not “near perfect.” They’ve also failed two fact checks in news reporting (not op-ed), which is seriously non-perfect. No one reading that page could walk away thinking that jpost isn’t biased toward both the current Israeli government and conservative causes. MBFC calling them “right-center” is also consistent with how they’re rated just about everywhere else. AllSides rates them as “center” (with a note that community feedback in disagreement believes they “lean right”) and even Wikipedia describes them as “center-right/conservative”.

What exactly are you angry about here?

Here’s coverage from the Guardian. It was a big story that was widely covered so it shouldn’t be hard to find another source if you want one.

I understand the concern about their sale but the conclusion that they aren’t reliable isn’t supported by evidence as far I can tell. Per the included link in the post, they haven’t failed a fact check in the last 5 years – and they were sold to Axel Springer in late 2021. MBFC has reviewed them multiple times since the acquisition. Politico, also acquired by Axel Springer, was rated “Leans Left” in blind bias reviews by AllSides both before and after the acquisition, so it doesn’t appear to have changed their editorial bias much either. I can’t find any evidence of a shift rightward or away from factual reporting.

They’ve been very active targeting Russia since the full-scale invasion, though they’ve been pretty quiet lately.

don’t tase me bro

dupe doop dewp

There’s an archive link at the bottom of the post.

It has more to do with them being identified and fleeing the country:

Holocaust memorial had recorded two figures arriving at about 3am with spray paint and stencils, as well as two or three other people who may have been involved. They were reportedly quickly identified from mobile phone information.

All were Bulgarian and left Paris by coach for Brussels later the same morning just after spray-painting the graffiti, France Info reported, confirming an earlier report in the satirical weekly Canard Enchaîné.

And the similarity to a previous incident:

In October, about 60 Stars of David were discovered on walls in Paris and districts on the outskirts. All were in a blue similar to the blue of the Israeli national flag.

A Moldovan couple were arrested in that case and their alleged handler, a pro-Russian Moldovan businessman, was identified, according to Agence France-Presse.

That does make it sound less good, but there’s also a compelling pro-Ukrainian argument for using revenue (and other funds) rather than the seized assets for defense. It’s widely agreed that Ukraine is owed those assets for reconstruction. Many want to liquidate them as an alternative to directly funding the defense effort, which could harm Ukraine’s ability to rebuild after the war. So it’s sort of robbing future-Ukraine to pay for the present. It’s especially risky because countries tend to lose focus of things like reconstruction and get distracted by the next shiny conflict or crisis.

That obviously depends on Ukraine’s allies continuing to fund their defense though.

Correct.