Rottcodd

Mmm...no

It's "some random guy with a working moral framework, the ability to feel empathy, and some measure of respect for the rights of other humans and simple human decency calling a bunch of murderous xenophobic psychopaths murderous xenophobic psychopaths." So it's in fact nothing like that.

Even beyond the fact that it's stupid and crazy, why is it ugly?

At the very least I would think that she'd want neat, clear, balanced letters rather than a crooked, lumpy scrawl.

Right, nor did I expect a rating based an on individual article - sorry if that's the way I made it sound.

It's simply that the rating of high credibility accompanying an article that was so obviously little more than a barrage of loaded language cast the problem into such sharp relief that I went from being unimpressed by MBFC to actively not wanting to see it.

All I see here is someone whose ego relies on a steady diet of derision hurled in the general direction of strangers on the internet.

I haven't seen any evidence that it does that, and quite the contrary, evidence that it does not - examples from publications ranging from Israel Times to New York Times to Slate in which it accompanied an article with clearly loaded language with an assessment of high credibility.

It's possible that it's improved of late - I don't know, since I blocked it weeks ago, after a particularly egregious example of that accompanied a technically factually accurate but brazenly biased Israel Times article.

If you’re not going to answer then I’ll just default to the obvious: you think you’re special and that everyone else is an idiot/sheeple/etc.

Right - you'll just assume that I see it as some sort of competition that I'm winning.

So are you saying that you wouldn't be able to recognize my second example as a biased statement without the MBFC bot's guidance?

Or did you just entirely miss the point?

I didn’t say it was a competition or anything remotely like that. Please show me where I did if you believe otherwise.

Okay

So you have a very high opinion of your own discretion but assume everyone else is trash or what?

Where would you put yourself as a percentile?

Right there. Obviously. In fact, that's the exact point of a percentile - it's a ranking system, which is to say, a competition.

So are you going to answer or not?

No.

No - actually I do the bulk of it based on presentation.

"Facts" fall into two categories - ones that can be independently verified, which are generally reported accurately regardless of bias, and ones that cannot be independently verified, which should be treated as mere possibilities, the likelihood of which can generally be at least better judged by the rest of the article. In neither case are the nominal facts particularly relevant.

Rather, if for instance the article has an incendiary title, a buried lede and a lot of emotive language, that clearly implies bias, regardless of the nominal facts.

That still doesn't mean or even imply that it's factually incorrect, and to the contrary, the odds are that it's technically not - most journalists at least possess the basic skill of framing things such that they're not technically untrue. If nothing else, they can always fall back on the tried and true, "According to informed sources..." phrasing. That phrase can then be followed by literally anything, and in order to be true, all it requires is that somebody who might colorably be called an "informed source" said it.

The assertion itself doesn't have to be true, because they're not reporting that it's true. They're just reporting that someone said that it's true.

So again, nominal facts aren't really the issue. Bias is better recognized by technique, and that's something that any attentive reader can learn to recognize.

The main problem that I see with MBFC, aside from the simple fact that it's a third party rather than ones own judgment (which is not infallible, but should still certainly be exercised, in both senses of the term) is that it appears to only measure factuality, which is just a tiny part of bias.

In spite of all of the noise about "fake news," very little news is actually fake. The vast majority of bias resides not in the nominal facts of a story, but in which stories are run and how they're reported - how those nominal facts are presented.

As an example, admittedly exaggerated for effect, compare:

Tom walked his dog Rex.

with

Rex the mangy cur was only barely restrained by Tom's limp hold on his thin leash.

Both relay the same basic facts, and it's likely that by MBFC's standards, both would be rated the same for that reason alone. But it's plain to see that the two are not even vaguely similar.

Again, exaggerated for effect.

The only competition here is between relying on ones own judgment vs. relying on a third party.

No it doesn't. That assumption just fits the strawman living inside your head.