Whilst the European Union talks of matters such as “strategic autonomy” and idealizes itself as a unified, independent force for good in the world, the reality could not be further from the truth. Espionage revelations are just the tip of the iceberg of a variety of ways in which the United States has, through its integration with Europe’s military and security dynamic, utilized a myriad of political tactics to strongarm the bloc into following its political will and agenda, even when it is apathetic or openly objects to it.
I don’t get people’s reliance on these media fact-checking tools. They don’t exist in a vacuum, free from bias themselves. From what I’ve seen they just report the maistream consensus about different networks, which is the liberal consensus and not necessarily correct.
Take this comparison between BBC (“far-left”), a “good source with factual reporting” and China Daily, a “mixed bag in factual reporting”:
From what I can tell, the only thing bringing down China Daily’s is the fact that it’s run and funded by the CPC, although the site is unaware how much funding it receives. Because of this, it’s been labelled state propaganda.
But the BBC is also funded by its government, the UK, and has admitted that the funding will be used to spread BBC’s reach over the world, especially in countries where there is a “democractic-deficit.”. The government document cited in that page is pretty explicit about this being a soft power move…it’s literally in the title of the section where they announce the new investment.
So then why hasn’t the BBC been labelled as spreading state propaganda and had its score on this media bias site docked?
Then there’s this entry for TeleSur, also a “mixed bag in factual reporting”:
It’s funded by various Latin American governments, although the media bias site doesn’t know how much, and has also been docked for being “propaganda.” Also, it seems like it’s been docked for some false reporting, of which a couple are listed at the bottom.
One of these is a tweet wrongly reporting an image as a popular mobilization in Chile.
Another is wrongly reporting that El Chapo set a bounty on Trump.
Another is falsely reporting that Christian Ronaldo donated $1.5 million to Palestinians in Gaza.
While these should not be excused, it also shouldn’t be used to generalize entire news networks as unreliable when many news networks wrongly report things at times. That’s why it’s good to judge things on a case-by-case basis like @nutomic@lemmy.ml did in this case.
Lastly, here’s the media bias site’s rating for Radio Free Asia:
The RFA has ties to the CIA, has a history of citing Falun Gong members, of citing unnamed sources, and yet it’s been given a good rating by this site.
Again, this site just seems to have a liberal bias in its reporting.
I think some people like these “fact checkers” because they provide an easy way to discard different opinions. Basically the allow to simply shout “fake news”, without having to do any critical thinking, or coming up with actual arguments.
I mean … can you really blame them? clinging to something to believe that you’re right feels really good, like really. and honestly at this point I don’t think the average person has any chance of actually knowing who’s right and who’s wrong.
I myself am going through some sort of cognitive dissonance since I joined Lemmy because of how different opinions are from other places I’ve been.
I mean I saw a few posts against wikipedia on the front page right now T_T
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