- US occupying forces in northern Syria are continuing to plunder natural resources and farmland, a practice ongoing since 2011
- Recently, US troops smuggled dozens of tanker trucks loaded with Syrian crude oil to their bases in Iraq.
- The fuel and convoys of Syrian wheat were transported through the illegal settlement of Mahmoudia.
- Witnesses report a caravan of 69 tankers loaded with oil and 45 with wheat stolen from silos in Yarubieh city.
- Similar acts of looting occurred on the 19th of the month in the city of Hasakeh, where 45 tankers of Syrian oil were taken out by US forces.
- Prior to the war and US invasion, Syria produced over 380 thousand barrels of crude oil per day, but this has drastically reduced to only 15 thousand barrels per day.
- The country’s oil production now covers only five percent of its needs, with the remaining 95 percent imported amidst difficulties due to the US blockade.
- The US and EU blockade prevents the entry of medicines, food, supplies, and impedes technological and industrial development in Syria.
Please avoid citing MBFC as a valid source.
If you’re going to discredit a source, please try to do the legwork of actually discrediting it. A guy with a Bachelors in Physiology and being “fascinated with politics since high school (a long time ago)” cannot be considered a reliable source, nevermind one who claims to follow the “scientific method” which he, presumably, learned while studying to become an occupational therapist or through his 20-year journey of reading political news.
If you have photos of this man, any record of interviews with him, records that support his credibility/the incorporation of his company, records of his job in occupational rehabilitation, details about his team, or anything else, please feel free to share them. Please do not confuse him with Dave E. Van Zandt (Princeton BA Sociology, Yale JD, London School of Economics PhD, ex-managing editor of the Yale Law Journal, ex-Dean of Northeastern’s School of Law, ex-President of The New School).
I don’t understand. Unless you have a degree in journalism or something similar you’re not allowed to be an expert on media outlets? How many professors of practice at universities don’t have a degree related to what they’re teaching?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m super put off by this notion that he had a “super keen eye“ and natural aptitude for spotting “bias.” I also object to the way that people talk about bias, but that’s another discussion. The point is yeah there’s a little bit of bullshit in there, but his background does not discredit the endeavor.
Professors of Practice tend to have experience in the industry they are professors in. Their reputation is hinged on their achievements, and they don’t cite their degree as being instrumental to their credibility.
Edit: professors are also, y’know, subject to scrutiny and can’t hide behind anonymity when they get things wrong.
The site’s history speaks for itself. Because or in spite of him, it’s a solid way to at-a-glance assess an outlet. It is not the whole story, it’s not even a great story, but it’s a start that’s pretty solid.
How would you support this claim? It’s solid because it exists and people read it?
Burden of proof is on you here. What about the site are you disputing here?
It’s credibility and reliability, which I’ve already done and which you’ve acknowledged.
Just do the legwork to critique the source, it’s not that hard. There’s no need to cite bad sources just because they exist.
You need to show it’s a bad source. Discrediting the founder does not satisfy that requirement.
The OP is using this “source” to discredit other sources. If you’re going to disprove another source, prove that your own source is legitimate in spite of the questions regarding its credibility.
MBFC is a good enough source for routine information, and its system is accurate enough to give a general idea of who finances, who writes, and whether the articles are sourced according to journalistic standards. It’s a good tool to help with critical evaluation of media sources. But you’re right: it’s not flawless.
Your attack on the founder is an ad hominem attack, and I don’t think it’s relevant. Are you suggesting that people can only learn things through a university education?
Besides, it’s often cited by university sources and experts as being a decent enough indicator of reliability and bias, if not necessarily held up to standards of something like a peer review.
It’s a tool to be used in conjunction with critical thought and evaluation of the source itself, and for that I think it’s rather accurate and useful.
Thing is, even if he is good at media criticism, there’s no stakes for him. Nobody knows who he is, what he looks like, he has nothing on the line, and his credibility in his primary occupation cannot be harmed if he is wrong.
Nevermind that he lacks the credentials nor any legitimate scientific expertise, and yet claims that his Bachelor’s in Physiology was sufficiently advanced to teach him everything he needs to know about the scientific process.
The dataset is seen in academia as being accurate enough to train machine learning models for or to make aggregate claims on. Machine learning models are not the bastions of truth, nor are their datasets.
Machine learning has nothing to do with this. I am referring to academics who study journalism, communication, political science, or sociology.
And it’s doesn’t really matter who he is at this point, the product he created works well and continues to be a reliable source to interrogate media sources.
I am happy that a person is able to create such a useful product, maintain it and continue to prove reliability in the product, and maintain anonymity. I certainly would want to remain anonymous if I was creating something that actively worked to check people’s information bias.
But it’s an irrelevant discussion: who he is doesn’t really matter when evaluating the work of the site itself.
“[MBFC’s] subjective assessments leave room for human biases, or even simple inconsistencies, to creep in. Compared to Gentzkow and Shapiro, the five to 20 stories typically judged on these sites represent but a drop of mainstream news outlets’ production.” - Columbia Journalism Review
“Media Bias/Fact Check is a widely cited source for news stories and even studies about misinformation, despite the fact that its method is in no way scientific.” - PolitiFact journalists
MBFC is used when analyzing a large swathe of data because they have ratings for basically every news outlet. There, if a quarter or a third of the data is wrong, you can still generate enough signal to separate from noise.
It absolutely matters who is running a site because there’s an inherent accountability for journalism. There’s a reason you don’t see NYT articles from “Anonymous Ostrich.”
I accept your point about why it matters who runs the site. I would just argue that in this case, it’s not as relevant because the goal seems to legitimately be information transparency, which is consistently delivered across its work. Its findings are at least generally reproducible. But no it’s not scientific. I believe I’ve stated that already, however it’s a good indication of reliability of a source.
Yes, human bias creeps in, hence my point of using it alongside general media literacy and critical thinking when evaluating media.
It aggregates and analyzes a ton of sources, and gives generally accurate information about how they are funded, where they are based, and how well the cite original sources. These are all things that can be corroborated by a somewhat systematic reading of the sources themselves.
An LLM also “aggregates and analyzes a ton of sources, and gives generally accurate information about how they are funded, where they are based, and how well the cite original sources.”
That doesn’t make an LLM a useful source.
Removed by mod
We don’t allow LLM-generated summaries as news stories. Do the legwork, use these tools to start if you want to, but don’t cite them as though they are gospel.