MBFC presents itself as "fact check" but it is really just subjective determinations slotted into an inappropriate analysis as judged by a political illiterate. The overall curve of "centrist" sources being high on facts simply reveals their own bias, where they fail to recognize the non-factual components of those sources, the train of think tanks, and whether topics are covered at all, or in certain contexts.

Ironically, the only time I ever see anyone trying to unironically make use of it and cite it is so that they can avoid critically engaging with media. They just say, "this website says it's bad" and turn their brains off, successfully short-circuiting cognitive dissonance.

[–] indomara@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ah, thanks for the clarification, I thought it was actually useful, but admit I had never looked into it and its sources.

[–] TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 month ago

Media criticism is a journey! It's good that you wanted to question sources and spent some time doing so. The annoying thing about media criticism is that there are a lot of tropes and think tanks and journalistic malpractices. And often no alternative information, so to understand a given news piece you might have to use a biased source with a poor track record (e.g. New York Times), look into the author, review all of the sources, try to see what might be accurate vs. what is PR BS, and still end up (correctly) thinking, "it's only 50:50 that the main claim us even true". After a while it gets easier because you know the think tanks, or already know enough about the subject matter to spot BS, or immediately notice that a given article is full of unsourced editorialization masquerading as journalism.

If you like podcasts, Citations Needed is an entertaining one that by two journalists goes over a trope or topic per episode. There are also transcripts available. I also recommend that people check out FAIR.org, a site focused on media criticism and more specifically calling out ongoing bad faith practices for current topics