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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38753 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I was not previously aware of this event, but my guess is that this is an isolated demand for rigor. All of the major news outlets are biased and unreliable when it comes to politics and science, and have tons of skeletons in their closet regarding mistakes that have either not been retracted, or not retracted very publicly or noticeably. They probably all belong under "generally unreliable", and I would support Fox News being put there IF all of the other major news sources were subject to the same level of scrutiny and most of them placed in the same bin.

If it's being considered in isolation though, then I expect people to use this as an opportunity to discredit and censor right-wing positions by holding it to a higher standard than everyone else.

Anyone can start one of these discussions about a source at any time, although in practice you have to gauge community mood at least a little. The key question here is whether you can pick a sentence from an article within the given topic and be confident that it's factually correct, and that's what's being questioned for Fox's politics articles.

If someone managed to put together a big list for, say, the NYT, I'd like to see it and I'm sure the community would like to see it. I agree without reservations that all major news sources should be subject to the same level of scrutiny.

For what it's worth: BuzzFeed currently has the same "no consensus" rating as Fox, although honestly on the strength of far less well-attended discussions.

For what it's worth, part 2: A discussion on MSNBC was launched after the last big Fox News discussion, but nobody put in the same amount of effort to find instances of inaccuracies (only one person posted, and they posted a mistake in a headline, and it is known that headlines aren't written by the article authors and are thus junk - see WP:HEADLINE). Thus the discussion reaffirmed that MSNBC is unusable for opinion pieces, as all opinion pieces are, and is generally reliable most other times, with the caveat that they don't even have written reporting on their news site so it's a bit of a strange discussion to have. (They have lots of blogs, though, which are all not suitable for use by policy.) If someone came up with a similar list for another major news outlet, I'd expect it to be taken seriously. I can't immediately find any examples of someone dropping a large list in an RfC on a "famous" left-wing source, but there's plenty to look through on the main "source reliability" list.

Incredible how downvoted this is.

It's downvoted because it's well known by this point the protests of Wikipedia's fairness are hollow. There is no more good faith -- if you ask, people will provide you long lists of documented instances of Wikipedia's entrenched biases, they will show you literal years of arguments about it, of people well-known and not discussing it. Whether it's GamerGate, or Elevatorgate, or Trump, or Russia, consistently, very, very consistently, Wikipedia slants in the same direction, fights every attempt to appeal this bias to the quick, and demands an exorbitant amount of energy to police lest an activist editor immediately launch right back into the nonsense.

I'm sure pigeon is sincere and willing to help reform Wikipedia. Of course, someone else suggested some fixes to the KiwiFarms article, and the immediate response from the pro-Wiki side was "alright, that might actually be impractical".

But sure -- utterly capture an institution and then use the fact your detractors have realized they shouldn't bother with it as evidence it's not captured, because those goofy detractors aren't even trying to exhaust themselves against you.

Faith in these discussions has been exhausted by years of previous conversations, and that bleeds through. I'd agree that it bodes poorly for the long-term health of the forum, which is why I've been pessimistic about this place's long-term prospects for quite some time now. On the other hand, it's lasted this long, so who knows?

Agreed. Good-faith quality comments getting downvoted like this doesn't bode well. Does it have any effect in the new site, though?

Doesn't seem like it.

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