Media Bias/Fact Check
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| Founded | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Greensboro, North Carolina |
| Owner | Dave Van Zandt[1] |
| URL | mediabiasfactcheck |
| Alexa rank |  24,452 (April 2020[update])[2] |
| Current status | Active |
Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is a website that rates factual accuracy and political bias in news media. The site classifies media sources on a political bias spectrum, as well as on the accuracy of their factual reporting. The site is run by founder and editor Dave Van Zandt and was founded in 2015.[1]
Methodology[edit]
Sites are rated on a 0-10 scale by Van Zandt and his team using categories such as biased wording and headlines, factuality and sourcing, and story choices.[3]
Reception[edit]
The Columbia Journalism Review describes Media Bias/Fact Check as an amateur attempt at categorizing media bias and Van Zandt as an "armchair media analyst."[3] The Poynter Institute notes, "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."[4]
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] The site was also used by a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in initial training of an AI to fact check and detect the bias on a website.[7][8]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ a b "About". Media Bias/Fact Check. Retrieved 2019-03-30.
- ^ "mediabiasfactcheck.com Competitive Analysis, Marketing Mix and Traffic". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2020-04-24.
- ^ a b "We can probably measure media bias. But do we want to?". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 2018-12-03.
- ^ "Here's what to expect from fact-checking in 2019". Poynter.org. 2018-12-18. Retrieved 2018-12-30.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Verger, Rob (2018-10-04). "This AI can help spot biased websites and false news". Popular Science. Retrieved 2019-01-01.
- ^ 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.