• 226 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • No, but I will acknowledge it is insane and idiotic for me to spend time educating people who use Billy Madison memes to accuse others of lowing the quality of discourse.

    How was the meaning of this word altered so dramatically in the United States? During the First World War, some of the leading Progressive writers began to use the word liberalism as a substitute for progressivism, which had become tarnished by its association with their fallen hero, Theodore Roosevelt, who had run and lost on a Progressive third party ticket. Traditional liberals were not happy to see their label transformed. In the 1920s, The New York Times criticized "the expropriation of the time-honored word ‘liberal’ " and argued that “the Radical-Red school of thought … hand back the word ‘liberal’ to its original owners.” During the early 1930s, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt duked it out as to who was the true liberal. Roosevelt won, adopting the term to ward off accusations of being left-wing. He could declare that liberalism was “plain English for a changed concept of the duty and responsibility of government toward economic life.” And since the New Deal, liberalism in the United States has been identified with an expansion of government’s role in the economy.

    – Daniel Yergin, The Commanding Heights



  • The use of the term ‘liberals’ by the Intercept is not meant to be synonymous with ‘the left’ – its meaning in this context is the political mainstream of the Democratic Party and the left wing of the Republican Party. The term comes from the philosophy of ‘economic liberalism’ and adjacent to terms like ‘neoliberal’ and ‘capitalist’ but inclusive of people who engage in politics consistent with those ideologies without explicitly self-identifying as ideologues.


























  • Five@slrpnk.nettoWorld News@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    Let’s be clear that I am anti-Putin and anti-Kim.

    Ad-hominem means “to the man” – that is, instead of attacking the message, one attacks the credibility of the messenger. This also includes when instead of defending the credibility of a message, one defends the credibility of the messenger. Ad-hominem is exactly the purpose of the MBFC bot. Instead of fact-checking the individual article, it tells you if the article is credible or not based on its clearly biased assessment of the article outlet.

    You are correct in that ad-hominem is generally a terrible way of judging credibility. I am not making an ad-hominem fallacy. I am responding to an ad-hominem fallacy that has been spammed in every thread in this community.



  • MBFC is claiming CNN is Left-Center, when it is owned by conservative billionaire John Malone. This is an example of MBFC’s intentional distortion of the political spectrum by falsely representing it as dominated by a left-wing bias.

    An example of CNN’s actual right-wing bias is when they put an obvious Trump Supporter on their televised panel of ‘undecided voters’. According to Parker Molloy from The New Republic, this isn’t “an isolated case of questionable representation in CNN’s voter panels. In fact, it appears to be part of a troubling pattern stretching back years.” She suggests it could be “a potential willingness to mislead viewers for the sake of compelling television.” - media ownership and their profit motive, and complicity of the media elite are sources of bias that MBFC does not adequately account for.

    !politics and !world now appear to be willing to consider backing away from MBFC. The vote to “Kill” – stop their bot from advertising MBFC in all of community posts – appears to be leading in both communities.

    If you upvote the Kill comment so that this lead becomes a landslide, you can make it even more embarrassing and difficult for them to claim ‘bots’ or backtrack.


  • ABC News is a brand of Disney Advertising. It is lead by a conservative billionaire, and is not a left-biased organization.

    Fact-checking is an essential tool in fighting the waves of fake news polluting the public discourse. But if that fact-checking is partisan, then it only acerbates the problem of people divided on the basics of a shared reality. Dave Van Zandt has admitted to a US-centric bias in MBFC’s ratings. It’s fairly easy to notice an American conservative lean in MBFC’s bias ratings, as well as their credibility ratings.

    A consortium of fact-checking institutions have joined together to form the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and laid out a code of principles. You can find a list of signatories as well as vetted organizations on their website. MBFC is not a signatory to the IFCN code of principles. As a partisan organization, it violates the standards that journalists have recognized as essential to restoring trust in the veracity of the news. Partisan fact-checking sites are worse than no fact-checking at all. Just like how the proliferation of fake news undermines the authority of journalism, the growing popularity of a fact-checking site by a political hack like Dave M. Van Zandt undermines the authority of non-partisan fact-checking institutions in the public consciousness.

    Please choose “Kill” – to stop giving free advertising to MBFC on Lemmy.


  • Five@slrpnk.nettoWorld News@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism. In 1948, Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens to protect the public from propaganda by its own government. The restriction was removed in 2013 to to adapt to the Internet age.

    In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA’s remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site.

    Most people do not believe that propaganda is anything that disagrees with the United States Government’s foreign policy, and find the idea that the VOA is less biased than the New York Times laughable. Lemmy.World endorses these absurdities by advertising Media Bias Fact Check in every post in their community. You have a limited time to let !politics and !world know what you think.


  • For the first time in decades, The Washington Post will not endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential election, the newspaper’s publisher announced Friday, a decision that sparked widespread outrage among the paper’s staffers.

    “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election,” Post publisher Will Lewis said in a statement. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”

    The Post reported the decision not to endorse was made by the newspaper’s billionaire owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, citing two sources briefed on the matter.

    CNN

    Media Bias Fact Check is a right-wing propaganda tool to repeat the laughable lie that the media has a left-wing bias.


  • Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism. In 1948, Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens to protect the public from propaganda by its own government. The restriction was removed in 2013 to to adapt to the Internet age.

    In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA’s remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site. VOA has been conspicuously silent on the charges. Their reporters have unparalleled access to the details of the case, but none of them appear to have done any investigation.

    According to David Van Zandt in MBFC’s methodology:

    It’s crucial to note that our bias scale is calibrated to the political spectrum of the United States

    To better understand this statement, it should be noted that MBFC regards VOA as “least biased” despite its uncontroversial status as the United States’ official propaganda outlet.


  • I think David Van Zandt has a vendetta against Philip Weiss. Racists tend to be unfeeling or feel contempt for ‘lesser’ racial groups, and are merely indifferent to their suffering. The most intense ‘hate’ in hate groups comes from the intensity of feeling racists have toward other people of their own race they perceive as ‘race traitors’ - who demonstrate that people who share their culture and heritage can afford empathy for the ‘other’ whom racists believe are unworthy of concern.

    Truthout is a reputable website, with good journalism and reporting. There’s a number of other websites that report favorably on Palestinians, and don’t toe Van Zandt’s line that criticism of Israel and antisemitism are the same thing. They have higher ‘Credibility’ and ‘Factual Reporting’ scores than Truthout. But Truthout occasionally rehosts reporting from Mondoweiss, a site that Van Zandt has labelled as ‘antisemitic,’ and therefore Truthout must be punished for giving support to the most notorious enemy of Israel – ‘self-hating’ Jews.