Media Bias/Fact Check
 | |
| Founded | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Greensboro, North Carolina |
| Owner | Dave M. Van Zandt[1] |
| URL | mediabiasfactcheck |
| Current status | Active |
Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is an American fact-checking website founded in 2015 by editor Dave M. Van Zandt.[1] It uses a 0-10 scale to rate sites on two areas: bias and factual accuracy. It has been criticised for its methodology and accuracy.[2]
Methodology
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 criteria for factual accuracy based on failed fact checks.[3] The group has also sorted hundreds of web pages into the ideological categories of: Left, Left Center, Least Biased, Right Center, and Right.[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]
Criticism
According to 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,"[2] something that Media Bias/Fact Check does admit and, according to their website, their method is frequently updated.[8] In 2018, 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".[3]
See also
References
- ^ a b "About". Media Bias/Fact Check. Retrieved 2019-03-30.
- ^ a b Funke, Daniel; Mantzarlis, Alexios (December 18, 2018). "Here's what to expect from fact-checking in 2019". Poynter.
- ^ a b Tamar Wilner (January 9, 2018). "We can probably measure media bias. But do we want to?". Columbia Journalism Review.
- ^ Thomas J. Main (February 1, 2022). "Both the Right and Left Have Illiberal Factions. Which Is More Dangerous?". The Bulwark. Retrieved February 18, 2022.
- ^ Dian Schaffhauser. "U-M Tracker Measures Reliability of News on Facebook, Twitter -- Campus Technology". Campus Technology. Retrieved 2018-12-03.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "Methodology". Media Bias/Fact Check. Retrieved 2022-02-07.