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I have to laugh at the Times of India (rated yellow) comment - "It tends to have a bias in favor of the Indian government". Times of India, An Phoblacht, CGTN,

I have to laugh at the Times of India (rated yellow) comment - "It tends to have a bias in favor of the Indian government". 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.

dash2 6y ago
What makes you sure that the BBC, Economist et al. are not genuinely more reliable than, say, Russia Today?
- Bresenham 6y ago
  The BBC was banned from broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin MPs who had been elected to the UK parliament. 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.
  - rhcom2 6y ago
    > The BBC was banned from broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin MPs who had been elected to the UK parliament. The British government instituted that ban, not the BBC. That was also ended almost 30 years ago. Russia is very low on press freedom (142) while the UK is at (28) is high [1] which seems to be the reason for its outlets to be unreliable. https://web.archive.org/web/20120131012309/http://en.rsf.org/spip.php?page=classement&id_rubrique=1043 https://web.archive.org/web/20120131012309/http://en.rsf.org...
  - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    Everyone in the UK was banned - but they got round it by having an actor reading what the SF MP's said. SF could have go round this by taking up their seats and using parliamentary privilege.
    - Bresenham 6y ago
      To take up their seats, they would have had to swear an oath - "I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God." So if the Irish republicans had sworn an oath of allegiance to the queen, her heirs and their successors, they could have had the benefits of UK press freedom. Ok.
      - pmyteh 6y ago
        It's clear that the ban on Sinn Féin members speaking on television was an abuse (by the government). But given that the BBC sidestepped the ban by having them re-voiced by actors (purportedly making Thatcher furious) it's difficult to see them as anything other than independent-minded in this instance.
  - dash2 6y ago
    My question wasn't "what makes you think the BBC is perfectly reliable", but "what makes you think it's not more reliable than RT et al."
Retric 6y ago
Bias and spin is allowed as long as the content is factually correct. Reliable relates to factual accuracy not spin, story selection etc. It’s one thing not to cover an inconvenient story, it’s another to lie about what happened. 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 6y ago
  > Fox News is well known for massive bias in the US 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.
- atlih 6y ago
  The war propaganda from those outlets marked green is not at all factual.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    "<some government official> said <false claim>" is still factual reporting if said government official did in fact make the false claim. It would be wrong to cite it as proof that the claim is in fact true, but it would be a good source to cite to show that the claim was made.
    - ulucs 6y ago
      Does nobody remember the Iraq war? The administration followed the media, not the other way https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-still-haunts-new-york-times https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-sti...
      - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
fsflover 6y ago
> Fox News Could be an error? https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-calling-fox-a-reliable-source/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-ca...
- magnio 6y ago
  Fox News is deemed reliable for news excluding politics and science. Also if you want to read the 70.000-word RfC regarding this issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_303#RfC:_Fox_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...
ulucs 6y ago
I could count two non US/UK green sources. If that's the outlook they have, Wikipedia should have no business documenting anything outside the Anglosphere.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  I count eight of them. I'm not sure which six you ignored, but there's three of them before you live the 'A's. 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.
  - arp242 6y ago
    > There's not a lot of French newspapers in that list, for example. Which isn't that surprising considering that English sources are preferred for the English-language Wikipedia. Usually, if there's something important in a French newspaper then English-language ones will report it as well, through their local correspondents.
swebs 6y ago
That's one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia. "Reliability" is based on perception and PR rather than any objective metrics. Which is due to the bigger problem that there really is no objective way to measure it. I don't know if there's any better way to do it, but right now the opinions of the most active users are the opinions that get accepted as facts.
cainxinth 6y ago
You seriously think RT should be given the same credence as the BBC? Now that's worthy of a laugh.
circlefavshape 6y ago
An Phoblacht is certainly not considered unbiased in Ireland, given that it is published by a political party 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
sdwa 6y ago
Do you honestly believe that, for example, the Economist is just as partial as RT, Sputnik, Telesur, or Xinhua? If not, then what point are you actually making? Your comment is purely surface level and relies heavily on cherry picking the data. Not least because there are numerous UK/US sources which are deemed unreliable, and numerous non-US/UK sources which are deemed reliable.
arp242 6y ago
If I look at this list then I don't really see any evidence of the allegations in your comment, and find your list of alleged examples to be highly cherry-picked and misleading. 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 6y ago
It’s myopic to assume that other countries have identical values and that their news souces wouldn’t be influenced by those values.
olau 6y ago
I had the same experience some years ago when I looked up a terror bombardment against Copenhagen by the British in 1807: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Copenhagen_(1807) 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 6y ago
  And interesting that around three decades hence would be signed the treaty on Belgium neutrality whose breakage would be cited by the Brits as casus belli against the Kaiser in WW1. But strategic hypocrisy has always been an element of statecraft so I digress.
alkonaut 6y ago
This is a terrible take. 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.
rstuart4133 6y ago
> Sites generally supportive of India, Venezuela, Russia, the Irish minority(/majority) in north Ireland, China etc. are not OK. 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.

dash2 6y ago

What makes you sure that the BBC, Economist et al. are not genuinely more reliable than, say, Russia Today?

Bresenham 6y ago
The BBC was banned from broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin MPs who had been elected to the UK parliament. 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.
- rhcom2 6y ago
  > The BBC was banned from broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin MPs who had been elected to the UK parliament. The British government instituted that ban, not the BBC. That was also ended almost 30 years ago. Russia is very low on press freedom (142) while the UK is at (28) is high [1] which seems to be the reason for its outlets to be unreliable. https://web.archive.org/web/20120131012309/http://en.rsf.org/spip.php?page=classement&id_rubrique=1043 https://web.archive.org/web/20120131012309/http://en.rsf.org...
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  Everyone in the UK was banned - but they got round it by having an actor reading what the SF MP's said. SF could have go round this by taking up their seats and using parliamentary privilege.
  - Bresenham 6y ago
    To take up their seats, they would have had to swear an oath - "I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God." So if the Irish republicans had sworn an oath of allegiance to the queen, her heirs and their successors, they could have had the benefits of UK press freedom. Ok.
    - pmyteh 6y ago
      It's clear that the ban on Sinn Féin members speaking on television was an abuse (by the government). But given that the BBC sidestepped the ban by having them re-voiced by actors (purportedly making Thatcher furious) it's difficult to see them as anything other than independent-minded in this instance.
- dash2 6y ago
  My question wasn't "what makes you think the BBC is perfectly reliable", but "what makes you think it's not more reliable than RT et al."

Retric 6y ago

Bias and spin is allowed as long as the content is factually correct. Reliable relates to factual accuracy not spin, story selection etc. It’s one thing not to cover an inconvenient story, it’s another to lie about what happened. 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 6y ago
> Fox News is well known for massive bias in the US 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.
atlih 6y ago
The war propaganda from those outlets marked green is not at all factual.
- yorwba 6y ago
  "<some government official> said <false claim>" is still factual reporting if said government official did in fact make the false claim. It would be wrong to cite it as proof that the claim is in fact true, but it would be a good source to cite to show that the claim was made.
  - ulucs 6y ago
    Does nobody remember the Iraq war? The administration followed the media, not the other way https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-still-haunts-new-york-times https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-sti...
    - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

fsflover 6y ago

> Fox News Could be an error? https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-calling-fox-a-reliable-source/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-ca...

magnio 6y ago
Fox News is deemed reliable for news excluding politics and science. Also if you want to read the 70.000-word RfC regarding this issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard/Archive_303#RfC:_Fox_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Not...

ulucs 6y ago

I could count two non US/UK green sources. If that's the outlook they have, Wikipedia should have no business documenting anything outside the Anglosphere.

jcranmer 6y ago
I count eight of them. I'm not sure which six you ignored, but there's three of them before you live the 'A's. 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.
- arp242 6y ago
  > There's not a lot of French newspapers in that list, for example. Which isn't that surprising considering that English sources are preferred for the English-language Wikipedia. Usually, if there's something important in a French newspaper then English-language ones will report it as well, through their local correspondents.

swebs 6y ago

That's one of the biggest problems with Wikipedia. "Reliability" is based on perception and PR rather than any objective metrics. Which is due to the bigger problem that there really is no objective way to measure it. I don't know if there's any better way to do it, but right now the opinions of the most active users are the opinions that get accepted as facts.

cainxinth 6y ago

You seriously think RT should be given the same credence as the BBC? Now that's worthy of a laugh.

circlefavshape 6y ago

An Phoblacht is certainly not considered unbiased in Ireland, given that it is published by a political party 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

sdwa 6y ago

Do you honestly believe that, for example, the Economist is just as partial as RT, Sputnik, Telesur, or Xinhua? If not, then what point are you actually making? Your comment is purely surface level and relies heavily on cherry picking the data. Not least because there are numerous UK/US sources which are deemed unreliable, and numerous non-US/UK sources which are deemed reliable.

arp242 6y ago

If I look at this list then I don't really see any evidence of the allegations in your comment, and find your list of alleged examples to be highly cherry-picked and misleading. 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 6y ago

It’s myopic to assume that other countries have identical values and that their news souces wouldn’t be influenced by those values.

olau 6y ago

I had the same experience some years ago when I looked up a terror bombardment against Copenhagen by the British in 1807: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Copenhagen_(1807) 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 6y ago
And interesting that around three decades hence would be signed the treaty on Belgium neutrality whose breakage would be cited by the Brits as casus belli against the Kaiser in WW1. But strategic hypocrisy has always been an element of statecraft so I digress.

alkonaut 6y ago

This is a terrible take. 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.

rstuart4133 6y ago

> Sites generally supportive of India, Venezuela, Russia, the Irish minority(/majority) in north Ireland, China etc. are not OK. 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.