Media Bias/Fact Check

Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is an American website founded in 2015 by editor Dave M. Van Zandt.[1] It uses a 0–10 scale to rate sites in two areas: bias and factual accuracy.

Media Bias/Fact Check
Founded2015 (2015)
HeadquartersGreensboro, North Carolina
OwnerDave M. Van Zandt[1]
URLmediabiasfactcheck.com
Current statusActive

Methodology
Chart showing the degree of bias rating given to CNN

Van Zandt and his team use a 0–10 scale to rate sites for biased wording, headlines, actuality, sourcing, story choices, and political affiliation. There is a criterion for factual accuracy based on failed fact checks.[2] The group has also sorted hundreds of web pages into the ideological categories of: Left, Left Center, Least Biased, Right Center, and Right.[3] Van Zandt admits he is not an expert and that "his methods are not rigorously objective."[4]

Usage

The site has been used by researchers at the University of Michigan to create a tool called the "Iffy Quotient", which draws data from Media Bias/Fact Check and NewsWhip to track the prevalence of "fake news" and questionable sources on social media.[5][6][7]

Reception

According to Daniel Funke and Alexios Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute, "Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific."[8] In 2018, the Columbia Journalism Review identified Media Bias/Fact Check as "an armchair media analysis."[9] Additionally, the Columbia Journalism Review described Media Bias/Fact Check as an amateur attempt at categorizing media bias and characterized their assessments as "subjective assessments [that] leave room for human biases, or even simple inconsistencies, to creep in".[2] A study published in Scientific Reports wrote: "While [Media Bias/Fact Check's] credibility is sometimes questioned, it has been regarded as accurate enough to be used as ground-truth for e.g. media bias classifiers, fake news studies, and automatic fact-checking systems."[10]

See also

References
  1. "About". Media Bias/Fact Check. Retrieved 2019-03-30.
  2. Tamar Wilner (January 9, 2018). "We can probably measure media bias. But do we want to?". Columbia Journalism Review.
  3. Thomas J. Main (February 1, 2022). "Both the Right and Left Have Illiberal Factions. Which Is More Dangerous?". The Bulwark. Retrieved February 18, 2022.
  4. Heffer, Chris (2020-10-01). All Bullshit and Lies?: Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness. Oxford University Press. p. 103. doi:10.1093/oso/9780190923280.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-092328-0.
  5. Dian Schaffhauser. "U-M Tracker Measures Reliability of News on Facebook, Twitter -- Campus Technology". Campus Technology. Retrieved 2018-12-03.
  6. Paul Resnick; Aviv Ovadya; Garlin Gilchrist. "Iffy Quotient: A Platform Health Metric for Misinformation" (PDF). School of Information - Center for Social Media Responsibility. University of Michigan. p. 5.
  7. Ramy Baly; Georgi Karadzhov; Dimitar Alexandrov; James Glass; Preslav Nakov (2018). "Predicting Factuality of Reporting and Bias of News Media Sources". Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Brussels, Belgium: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 3528–3539.
  8. Funke, Daniel; Mantzarlis, Alexios (December 18, 2018). "Here's what to expect from fact-checking in 2019". Poynter.
  9. Albarracin, Dolores; Albarracin, Julia; Chan, Man-pui Sally; Jamieson, Kathleen Hall (2021). Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped. Cambridge University Press. p. 130. doi:10.1017/9781108990936. ISBN 978-1-108-84578-6. S2CID 244413957.
  10. Chołoniewski, Jan; Sienkiewicz, Julian; Dretnik, Naum; Leban, Gregor; Thelwall, Mike; Hołyst, Janusz A. (2020). "A calibrated measure to compare fluctuations of different entities across timescales". Scientific Reports. 10 (1): 20673. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-77660-4. ISSN 2045-2322. PMC 7691371. PMID 33244096.
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