cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/23066599
Since 2017, Wikipedia editors have compiled a list of news sources from which articles are highly likely to employ systematic bias, lack professional editing and/or journalistic standards, regularly misrepresent sources, and/or fabricate information.
While its list is by no means a complete list of publications with the aforementioned problems, it has helped make Wikipedia articles more reliable by basing them off of sources covering the same events and information from a less biased point of view.
To make Lemmy news communities better than their Reddit counterparts, I think avoiding links to those sources in favor of more reliable alternatives would be worthwhile.
I think it’s sound. Ban really low quality news (daily mail), state sponsered propaganda outlets, and far right trash. The list is relatively short.
Note that the sources on the list are there due to the frequent publication of misinformation, rather than their bias alone.
As others have noted, the list can essentially be broken down into three categories: state-sponsored media outlets, clickbait-style tabloids, and extremist media outlets.
The categories themselves are just a means of summarizing what’s on the list though, as outlets in those categories that maintain editorial standards that disallow misinformation wouldn’t qualify for inclusion on the list.
When this has come up before I have mentioned I would rather these not get banned, but an auto-mod style message is included to explain that they are low quality sources.
It’s not too difficult to stick to that because here it’d be largely the Mail and a few tabloids, which tend not to be used in the serious news sections here anyway unless it’s a piss-take of the Mail.
I’ll let people in on a secret: I’ve quietly been working to that list for Unitedkingdom and UK Politics when I try to make decisions on whether a source is valid or not. That, and reminding people that DMG has other outlets, such as ThisIsMoney.
If people would like to codify it more formally, we can do that.
