This project began as a post about a year ago, in which we followed the provenance of the data from a study about misinformation until, at the bottom, we found Media Bias/Fact Check. Upon further examination, it turned out that Media Bias/Fact Check is just some guy, and upon him there rests a surprising amount of academic research. We've since turned this into a study with the following abstract:
Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) purports to quantify the bias, credibility, and factuality of reporting for roughly 10,000 media sources, and the resulting data is commonly used in misinformation research. In the present study, we show that MBFC's methodology does not meet basic standards of rigor for academic research. Despite its widespread prevalence, studies using MBFC rarely examine it carefully, often describing it in ways that contradict its "About" page, or treating it as authoritative despite MBFC's disclaimer that it is "not a tested scientific method... [but] a simple guide to the idea of a source's bias." We identified no papers that adequately describe MBFC as the opinions of a single person or critically engage with its methodology in order to justify proceeding with its use. We argue that MBFC's data is not neutral or accurate, but a computationally legible account of hegemony, a specious dataset for uncritical research that mistakes the familiarity of the concepts it quantifies with accuracy. Our study concludes with a call for academic researchers to stop using MBFC. MBFC's data quantifies the results of political processes, including campaigns to discredit the press, and presents them as simple facts about the world, thus reproducing the crisis misinformation scholarship exists to address.
I’ve been saying this for over two years.
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We need someone with some Marxist literacy to create a similar project and call it like something equally neutral sounding, like, "media bias credibility meter".
I guess prolewiki already could handle this, but liberals are immediately turned off by the partisan pro-worker viewpoint, and are easily duped by anything that sounds neutral on its cover.
Love that Joe Rogan is in the center of that chart.
The linked paper has some of the graphs you're looking for, and much analysis that I think you'll like. I even cite both Bernays and Chomsky in the paper. I'm also happy to send you the MBFC data if you'd like. If you want to just get it for yourself, the API has a freemium API tier that only lets you make a handful of requests, but each request gives you the whole dataset, so it's basically free unless you want to keep updating it.
The “spectacle of computation” is a great callback.
If you want to see an example of utter nonsense “data-driven” research, Roll in the Tanks! Measuring Left-wing Extremism on Reddit at Scale. Older versions of the paper had a whole section dedicated to lemmygrad.ml.
Why would they write this? Presumably because that’s where grant money is being directed lately. Previously, three years ago: Atlantic Council: Collective Security in a Federated World