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Bresenham | 5 years ago
Times of India, An Phoblacht, CGTN, Global Times, Press TV, Ria Novosti, Russia Today, Sputnik, TASS, Telesur, Venezuelanalysis and Xinhua are all yellow or red.
BBC, Bellingham, Economist, Forbes, Fox News, New Republic, NPR, Reason and Weekly Standard are all rated green.
It is pretty clear - sites generally supportive of the US/UK governments and their businesses are OK. Sites generally supportive of India, Venezuela, Russia, the Irish minority(/majority) in north Ireland, China etc. are not OK. It's just a myopic view of the world from two English-speaking countries, and English Wikipedia.
Retric|5 years ago
Fox News is well known for massive bias in the US, but they try to stick to the facts. Russia Today etc is a little more factually flexible.
PS: Just be careful, saying something factually accurate that’s misinterpreted by most viewers is a common tactic. For example talking about US “income tax” as if it where the only US tax on people’s incomes.
jcranmer|5 years ago
It's also worth emphasizing that the rating of Fox News changes dramatically based on the type of programming. The talk show segments (e.g., Fox and Friends) are rated as bad content. They also indicate that you should use caution citing Fox News for politics and science since it's biased.
CivBase|5 years ago
It's interesting that they didn't do a similar split for CNN or MSNBC. The summary for both networks says to consider talk shows as "opinion pieces", which should not be "considered reliable for [...] statements asserted as fact", but then why aren't they split out as separate sources?
atlih|5 years ago
tristor|5 years ago
Russia Today is a state-run propaganda outlet specifically structured to engage viewers and shift perspectives outside of Russia about Russian behaviors and affairs. It's essentially the Russian government pulling a "Radio Free Europe"[1] against the US, and it's no surprise that RT has become a darling for conspiracy theorists and right-wing trolls in the US since.
Calling RT "factually flexible" is hilarious and far too charitable. The grandparent has a point that their green sources tend to be biased towards a pro-West point-of-view, but pointedly they're also all sources which exist (for better or for worse) as editorially independent from their governments, and have a strong history of criticism of their own government as well as governments around the world. The sources considered yellow aren't merely biased, they have a history of being shills, choosing not to run stories or to outright lie when it benefits their government or political agenda. Many of the red sources could only be quantitatively considered "fake news".
It's not a mistake that US/UK based sources are more reliable than sources elsewhere, and while it likely is somewhat influenced by the bias of the people making the list, it's also heavily influenced by the reality of the situation. Most of the world, especially the developing world, does not have a true freedom of the press that has been established in the West for far longer. This situation is shifting, to some degree, but we've also seen backslides. Honest journalism and press freedom isn't something we can take for granted, we must actively fight to keep it and to hold journalists and governments accountable as a people. It was just in 2018 that Hungary (an EU member state) had it's /last/ opposition non-state media outlet shut down under threat, and now has all of its Hungarian-language news completely beholden to the state. This isn't a case unique to the developing world, it's happening in parts of Europe too, and we've seen dangerous shifts in the US.
I think the grandparent's complaint is honestly more biased than this list, and reveals that they hold resentment towards the West and believe (rightly) that the world is dominated by a Western narrative as an outcome of the US global hegemony. What they fail to admit to themselves is that this also is the driving force behind press freedom increasing globally, because the natural state of affairs is for media to avoid stepping on toes, and they must admit that most of the outlets they've listed, including the Times of India, have taken blatant actions that would call their reliability into question.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
sdwa|5 years ago
dash2|5 years ago
Bresenham|5 years ago
So starting from the vantage of a news service banning interviews with members of its own country's parliament, outlets like Russia Today have to be below that bar.
A number of Russian outlets are listed as unreliable - perhaps some of them are tabloids like English language tabloids, but it seems that all Russian outlets with a standard mild or heavy support of their government are not OK, whereas this is not the case for the US and UK outlets with the same mild to heavy view of things from their country's vantage. It is just the myopic view of the English speaking countries.
swebs|5 years ago
_v7gu|5 years ago
jcranmer|5 years ago
The bias you're seeing towards the lack of non-Anglosphere sources in the list is likely the bias against non-English sources--whether good or bad. There's not a lot of French newspapers in that list, for example.
This list is essentially culled from discussions of "is this source reliable or not?" on the English-language discussions in Wikipedia. Non-English-language sources simply aren't going to appear in those discussions with any frequency, because most editors editing English-language articles aren't going to be using non-English-language sources.
alkonaut|5 years ago
State media from countries without free press doesn’t really have a chance to be independent (and thus not reliable).
It’s not really about US or UK it’s about countries with a reasonably free press vs countries without.
If I want a perspective from Russia, there are outlets other than RT to look at.
cainxinth|5 years ago
Now that's worthy of a laugh.
fsflover|5 years ago
Could be an error?
https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-ca...
magnio|5 years ago
Also if you want to read the 70.000-word RfC regarding this issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...
rstuart4133|5 years ago
I can't square that these ratings from Wikipedia:
- The Hindu: trustworthy. There is consensus that The Hindu is generally reliable and should be treated as a newspaper of record.
- Al Jazeera: trustworthy. Al Jazeera is considered a generally reliable news organization.
- The Indian Express: trusted. The Indian Express is considered generally reliable under the news organizations guideline.
- The South China Morning Post: trusted. The South China Morning Post is widely considered to be the English-language newspaper of record in Hong Kong.
- Xinhua News Agency: no consensus. Xinhua News Agency is the official state-run press agency of the People's Republic of China. There is consensus that Xinhua is generally reliable for factual reporting except in areas where the government of China may have a reason to use it for propaganda or disinformation. Xinhua is also generally reliable for the views and positions of the Chinese government and its officials. For subjects where the Chinese government may be a stakeholder, the consensus is almost unanimous that Xinhua cannot be trusted to cover them accurately and dispassionately; some editors favour outright deprecation because of its lack of editorial independence.
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
olau|5 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Copenhagen_(1807)
I was trying to find out if terror bombardments were a standard part of war at the time, but couldn't help noticing that there was a pretty stark difference between the facts present in the English version and those present in the Danish.
Denmark was neutral, and Danish troops were stationed with the king at the border to guard against a possible attack from the French army, while the navy was mostly not fitted out for war in alignment when the neutral status. Then the Brits came and set the capitol on fire with a huge bombardment, when the Danish king refused to abandon neutrality. Well, he had to abandon it afterwards - when the Brits took the navy, there was no defending against Napoleon.
deathlight|5 years ago
[deleted]
circlefavshape|5 years ago
Based on its inclusion in your list of objections above, I assert that you know less about this subject than the community of wikimedia editors whose consensus this list reflects, and are arguing from a position of ignorance
arp242|5 years ago
Fox News' listing explicitly excludes politics and science; it's listed as "Fox News (news excluding politics and science)". And Fox News talk shows are red. This sounds about right. Many other entries are considerably more nuanced; Reason, for example, is listed as "generally reliable for news and facts. Editors consider Reason to be a biased or opinionated source that primarily publishes commentary, analysis, and opinion articles. Statements of opinion should be attributed and evaluated for due weight." Again, this sounds about right for Wikipedia's purpose.
Quite a few of the "non-American" examples you list are explicit propaganda outlets of authoritarian governments. I don't see the problem with being careful with those. I don't know about the Times of India specifically, but a number of other Indian publications are listed as green, such as The Hindu and The Indian Express. There is also the South China Morning Post with the comment that "additional considerations may apply for the newspaper's coverage of certain topics, including the Chinese Communist Party and the SCMP's current owner, Alibaba."
This is for the English-language Wikipedia, so it's no surprise that English publications (i.e. the UK and US) dominate the list. And besides, there are many American and British entries that are listed as red or yellow: The Daily Mirror, Gawker, AlterNet, Breitbart News, BuzzFeed, Cato Institute, CEPR, Cracked.com, The Daily Caller, HuffPost, New York Post, OANN, The Sun, and more.
mherkender|5 years ago