Media Bias/Fact Check

Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is a website founded in 2015 by editor Dave Van Zandt.[1] The website has been described as an amateur effort to rate news media sources based on factual accuracy and political bias.[2][3]

Media Bias/Fact Check
Founded2015 (2015)
HeadquartersGreensboro, North Carolina
OwnerDave Van Zandt[1]
URLmediabiasfactcheck.com
Current statusActive

Methodology
Chart showing the degree of bias rating given to CNN

Sites are rated on a 0–10 scale by Van Zandt and his team using categories such as biased wording and headlines, factuality and sourcing, and story choices.[2]

Reception

The Columbia Journalism Review describes Media Bias/Fact Check as an amateur attempt at categorizing media bias and Van Zandt as an "armchair media analyst."[2] The Poynter Institute notes, "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."[4] Alexandra Kitty, in a 2018 book on journalism, described MBFC as an apparent "amateur/civic outfit" and wrote that its founder's only qualification was a degree in communications.[3]

The site has been used by researchers at the University of Michigan to create a tool called the "Iffy Quotient", which draws data from Media Bias/Fact Check and NewsWhip to track the prevalence of "fake news" and questionable sources on social media.[5][6] The site was also used by a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in initial training of an AI to fact check and detect the bias on a website.[7][8]

See also

References
  1. "About". Media Bias/Fact Check. Retrieved 2019-03-30.
  2. Tamar Wilner (January 9, 2018). "We can probably measure media bias. But do we want to?". Columbia Journalism Review.
  3. Kitty, Alexandra (2018). When Journalism was a Thing. Zero Books. p. 158.
  4. "Here's what to expect from fact-checking in 2019". Poynter.org. 2018-12-18. Retrieved 2018-12-30.
  5. Dian Schaffhauser. "U-M Tracker Measures Reliability of News on Facebook, Twitter -- Campus Technology". Campus Technology. Retrieved 2018-12-03.
  6. Paul Resnick; Aviv Ovadya; Garlin Gilchrist. "Iffy Quotient: A Platform Health Metric for Misinformation" (PDF). School of Information - Center for Social Media Responsibility. University of Michigan. p. 5.
  7. Verger, Rob (2018-10-04). "This AI can help spot biased websites and false news". Popular Science. Retrieved 2019-01-01.
  8. Ramy Baly; Georgi Karadzhov; Dimitar Alexandrov; James Glass; Preslav Nakov (2018). "Predicting Factuality of Reporting and Bias of News Media Sources". Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Brussels, Belgium: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 3528–3539.
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