• gaael@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    First, thanks for doing the work of checking sources for articles posted here, I believe you add value to the conversation.
    This being said, I happen to disagree with you - here’s why.

    There seems to be a common misconception about bias and trustability.

    The site you linked to has two ratings: factual reporting and bias.

    Factual reporting is determined by how they do their jobs: do they check their facts and sources before they publish?
    ABC news australia is voted 4/5 on that scale, which I’d say makes them pretty trustworthy - most of the time, they report accurate and verified information.

    Bias is the way you choose the informations you report and how you comment on them. For exemple, while reporting the same information “billionaires are now x% richer than last year”, a left biased paper could comment on how non billionaires are getting poorer and a right biased paper could list the billionaires and applaud their financial choices. As a strongly left biased person myself, I’ll ignore the right biased paper nit because I think they’re lying, but because I don’t find their commentary relevant.
    Everybody and every news source is biased, and it’s okay. There is usually no neutrality possible when you do journalistic work, because your job is to provide context and commentary around the facts that you report.

    IMO, bias is not a metric helpful to determine credibility, and I find it a little detrimental that the site you linked to has bias and fact checking displayed at the same place without providing a better differentation between the two.

    On a side note, the pursuit of a fictionnal “journalistic neutrality” supposedly devoid of any bias has been and still is weaponized in the french news, where women, muslils or people or color are told they can’t report on subjects that they know well because they are supposedly too close to the topic and wouldn’t be able to stay neutral. While of course cishet white privileged men can report on those subjects because they are more “objective”…