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3·6 months agoMeanwhile most of Southeast Asia and the Middle East are not. What, exactly, is your point?
There’s already a UN body to handle disputes between states: the International Court of Justice. The ICC’s primary role is to prosecute individuals, not states.
This is the same ICC that the United States, Russia, China, and India are all not party to?
The same ICC that Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Laos, Myanmar, and Brunei are all not party to?
I guess Taiwan can join the illustrious list of signatories in the East/Southeast Asia region: Cambodia, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and Timor-Leste.
It’s hard because the userbase of these platforms tends to be predominantly American since America dominates the Western Anglophone world.
The largest “Western” Anglophone countries are, in order of population: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and Ireland. In fact, it’s not a stretch to suggest that, in terms of natively English countries, the US population exceeds that of all others combined.
Some mods have also been deleting comments that add context to mod abuse. @naturalgasbad gave me the full DM context for their “bad faith argument” with a moderator (they did not specify which one), which I posted in a comment in the other pinned thread. It’s a rather childish escalation sequence imo. That comment was deleted for “violating Rule 6”, but I have copied it below for the record:
For the record, naturalgasbad sent me their exchange with the moderator, which stemmed from the moderator in question removing SCMP articles due to “SCMP not meeting reliability guidelines.”
@moderator:
Al Jazeera is reliable when they aren’t talking about things that involve Qatar, that seems to be their specific blind spot.
Kyiv Post and the Telegraph I haven’t specifically looked at, if they get reported I’ll check them out.
@naturalgasbad:
Literally by the standards on SCMP you quoted, they’re unreliable.
@moderator:
SCMP: Mixed for factual reporting due to poor sourcing.
Al Jazeera: Mixed for factual reporting due to failed fact checks that were not corrected and misleading extreme editorial bias that favors Qatar.
You: “bUt ThEyR’e ThE sAmE!!!”
Poor sourcing is poor sourcing. You picked a shitty news agency. Try to do better next time.
(for reference, the Daily Telegraph is also “mixed due to poor sourcing” and Kyiv Post is “mixed due to failed fact checks”)
@naturalgasbad:
MBFC claims SCMP has poor sourcing based on the suggestion that they’re misrepresenting the US import ban on China (the one “failed fact check” according to them). That’s how MBFC gives the commentary on their ratings. It’s based on a sample-size of one. There’s no long-term commentary provided by MBFC because their entire ratings system and commentary is based on sampling a small number of articles (we don’t know which ones) and going off of what goes wrong within that sample.
It’s also reflecting the problem of a US-based bias assessment website: it suggests that ideas within the US Overton window are “correct” will those shared by the Global South are “less correct.”
From what I can tell, some of the problem is what they assume the basic level of skill is for readers. A few weeks ago, I posted a story about SCMP reporting on a research study published in Science. Members of this community failed to find it, despite being told the subject, authors, where it was published, and when it was published. That’s not poor sourcing, but poor research ability on behalf of the readers.
@moderator:
Continuing to argue with a mod who has made their decision will not win you any favors. Keep it up and you’ll get a ban on top of having your shitty links removed, oh, wait, you’ve already been banned for abusing the report feature. I can easily extend that.
@naturalgasbad
But again, MBFC’s entire commentary on SCMP’s issues is reliant on this single sentence from a single article. It’s inherently because MBFC relies on a small sample set of each site to determine a rating because they lack the manpower and the educational foundation to provide comprehensive analysis of a news source. Either way, that article was an editorial, not a news report. (In any cases, SCMP is commenting on Chinese reports written in Chinese, which American readers struggle to find because they don’t speak Chinese).
[The [U.S. import ban] has been taken without evidence being provided.]
Unlike SCMP’s reporting, Polygraph is unable to source the article this claim can be found in. From the articles I can find that, SCMP is comnenting based on this statement:
[The ban creates a “rebuttable presumption” that any Xinjiang goods were tainted by the use of forced labour – a “guilty until proven innocent” principle that effectively inverts US customs laws related to forced labour]
In fact, Ad Fontes’ media bias chart considers SCMP to be “reliable” (reliability score of 41.56 on a 0-64 scale) and “centrist” (bias score of -3.3 on a scale of -42 - 42). This is on par with Al Jazeera (41.65, -6.71) and New York Times (41.92, -7.96) and better than Washington Post (38.08, -8.69). (Ad Fontes also has issues, but your obsession with MBFC in particular is a little odd).
@moderator:
7 day ban. Want to go for 30?
@naturalgasbad:
I cited Ad Fontes. Feel free to criticize their methodology.
@moderator:
30 days. Keep going.
@naturalgasbad:
So… Do you not like Ad Fontes’ methodology, then?
@moderator:
And permaban. Good luck on your next account.
Children, please stop fighting.
I’ve been trying to get the other lemmy.ml worldnews mods to tone down their moderation on that community under the principle that if someone’s comment is offensive, they should get called out for it instead of having their comments immediately removed. We’ll see what happens lol
They told me what they preferred, but you are right that I assumed they would be offended. My bad.
SCMP is considered pretty reliable by most Western media outlets. It’s still used as a source for Reuters news wires and Associated Press articles. It’s still banned in mainland China for being too “edgy” or whatever, and the Hong Kong government still bars them from many events for “security reasons.” It’s still used by the Canadian Armed Forces College in their news feed SOMNIA. It’s used by Bloomberg, which many financial folks over on State Street use as a source to trade billions of dollars on.
Their op-eds are more, well, opinionated and editorialized than in the past, but anybody submitting op-eds to a news community needs to reconsider doing so in the first place. If you evaluated WaPo or the NYT solely off of their op-eds, you’d think you were reading a rag like the Daily Mail.
If Reuters, Associated Press, Bloomberg, and the Canadian Armed Forces rely on SCMP, what makes the moderators of this community think they know better?
They’re telling me they were reporting articles which didn’t match the community’s policy on reliability according to MBFC credibility crating and that the moderator in question refused to respond constructively.
Edit: I don’t have the DMs from either side, which might help tell the story lol
They told me they were banned because they kept citing the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart and the mods here preferred the Media Bias Fact Check ratings.
Please don’t assume their gender. This is basic etiquette.
Yeah, I don’t like removing posts for political reasons. On lemmy.ml’s news community we try to allow for a wider range of sources.
Kyiv Post has publicly received funding from the US state-backed National Endowment for Democracy. Allan Weinstein, cofounder of the National Endowment for Democracy, said in an interview with the Washington Post"A lot of what we (the NED) do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."
Not sure if a news source backed by what is, by their own admission, the public-facing branch of the CIA would be considered “reputable.”
According to the New York Times, the NED has been caught funding a opposition groups in France to undermine the ruling party. The NED was also implicated in helping to fan the fires of the Arab Spring.
ProPublica has this to say: “The National Endowment for Democracy was established by Congress, in effect, to take over the CIA’s covert propaganda efforts. But, unlike the CIA, the NED promotes US policy and interests openly.”
I see no reason to doubt the numbers from the Georgian group that Kyiv Post cites, but that is in spite of it being reported in the Kyiv Post, not because of it. NED-funded sources are literally spreading propaganda, and any source that’s willing to take money from the NED is showing a willingness to spread propaganda.
The findings by the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale School of Public Health, which receives U.S. State Department funding
This supposed report is inaccessible from their portal ukraine.conflictobservatory.org or hub.conflictobservatory.org/portal/apps/site/#/home/pages/belarus-children-deportation as of the time of this comment.
This is just plain bad journalism.
Would you like to explain to the class what an explosion of chemicals and radioisotopes is? It’s a clear retaliation for Russia pulling out of CTBT.
The first US nuclear test in decades isn’t world news? What the fuck is?
Bias standards are also widely different depending on the topic covered. For example, Al Jazeera is well-known for not criticizing the Qatari government, but that doesn’t invalidate their reporting of international issues. Similarly, the bandwagoning that happens when certain American media outlets cover international news doesn’t invalidate their reporting of domestic issues. I don’t think bias is a very good metric for assessing news sources so much as facts are. If a paper reports all the facts, verifies those facts, but puts their own spin on it, that’s valid reporting. If a paper just grabbed a Reuters wire or official government statement without verifying the details, that’s not really reporting at all.
We’ve seen that shockingly often: in the case of the Indian moon landing, good chunks of American media was using the headline “India lands on the South Pole” despite being 21 degrees off because Reuters said so. In the case of the supposedly beheaded babies, those same chunks of America media used the headline “40 babies beheaded” and cited a single IDF source that wasn’t supported by the statements of journalists on the ground. Moreover, in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, depending on whether you read AFU or MoD reports, you could have entirely different opinions of the war (both reports are almost certainly wrong).
There’s a problem much greater than that of spreading “biased content” and that’s the one of spreading misinformation or unsubstantiated/poorly substantiated claims. I think it’s the responsibility of moderators of a community to police the latter first and to allow the community to attempt to form consensus on the former. It might be good to keep track of the record of different news outlets as well (e.g. when later news reveals that previous reports were inaccurate, to determine how often news sources “jump the gun” and report claims with poor evidence). Skewing facts is the entire purpose of reporting, but making shit up or citing government claims as fact show laziness and a lack of journalistic integrity.
FWIW, most sites which rank media bias and factual reporting evaluate it from a Western perspective. As has been pretty well-established by various UN resolutions (e.g. the recognition of Palestine), the world does not consist solely of the West and world news should not consist solely of Western news outlets. Even as a Canadian (and most definitely in the West), some of the “centrist, unbiased” American sources sound like loony right-wing warhawks and some of the “centrist, unbiased” European sources are extremely racist. People in the rest of the world do exist and claiming that they don’t know any better than the enlightened West is, frankly, racist.
tl;dr I think policing bias before policing misinformation is putting the cart way before the horse. As a community focusing on world news, it should actually consider perspectives from around the world.
Yes
The Philippines when they use cyanide fishing in Southeast Asia: don’t worry guys, it’s a perfectly safe and normal activity and contributes to the economy.
The Philippines when someone else uses cyanide fishing in Southeast Asia: horrible! Environmental catastrophe! Condemn them!