[Bresenham]

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.

[Retric]

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]

> 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.

[CivBase]

Regarding Fox News in particular, they are split into three parts: talk shows, politics and science, and everything else. The talk shows are red for "generally unreliable", politics and science are yellow for "no consensus", and everything else is green for "generally reliable".

It's interesting that they didn't do a similar split for CNN or MSNBC. The summary for both networks says to consider talk shows as "opinion pieces", which should not be "considered reliable for [...] statements asserted as fact", but then why aren't they split out as separate sources?

[atlih]

The war propaganda from those outlets marked green is not at all factual.

[yorwba]

"<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.

[_v7gu]

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-sti...

[yorwba]

I had not yet learned English at the time and I was definitely not reading the New York Times, so no, I do not remember their coverage of the Iraq war.

That said, your link contradicts your statement that "the administration followed the media":

> The way the pre-war game worked was that Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile opposition group, served as a public relations clearing house for Iraqi defectors under Hussein. Chalabi then connected the defectors with journalists like Miller so they could tell their wild tales, based on what they claimed was first-hand knowledge, about Iraq's mounting WMD threat. Of all the mainstream journalists on the defector beat however, Miller was the most impressed and least skeptical of Chalabi's sources; sources who were spreading pro-war talking points on behalf of the pro-war American administration.

There are no links to any NYT articles based on Chalabi's sources, but I assume they still presented the information they got from him as something a source had told them, not something that the reporters themselves hat witnessed in person.

[6510]

the news use to be like this https://youtu.be/rWtwjDhgN3Q?t=32

Theater basically.

[tristor]

> Russia Today etc is a little more factually flexible.

Russia Today is a state-run propaganda outlet specifically structured to engage viewers and shift perspectives outside of Russia about Russian behaviors and affairs. It's essentially the Russian government pulling a "Radio Free Europe"[1] against the US, and it's no surprise that RT has become a darling for conspiracy theorists and right-wing trolls in the US since.

Calling RT "factually flexible" is hilarious and far too charitable. The grandparent has a point that their green sources tend to be biased towards a pro-West point-of-view, but pointedly they're also all sources which exist (for better or for worse) as editorially independent from their governments, and have a strong history of criticism of their own government as well as governments around the world. The sources considered yellow aren't merely biased, they have a history of being shills, choosing not to run stories or to outright lie when it benefits their government or political agenda. Many of the red sources could only be quantitatively considered "fake news".

It's not a mistake that US/UK based sources are more reliable than sources elsewhere, and while it likely is somewhat influenced by the bias of the people making the list, it's also heavily influenced by the reality of the situation. Most of the world, especially the developing world, does not have a true freedom of the press that has been established in the West for far longer. This situation is shifting, to some degree, but we've also seen backslides. Honest journalism and press freedom isn't something we can take for granted, we must actively fight to keep it and to hold journalists and governments accountable as a people. It was just in 2018 that Hungary (an EU member state) had it's /last/ opposition non-state media outlet shut down under threat, and now has all of its Hungarian-language news completely beholden to the state. This isn't a case unique to the developing world, it's happening in parts of Europe too, and we've seen dangerous shifts in the US.

I think the grandparent's complaint is honestly more biased than this list, and reveals that they hold resentment towards the West and believe (rightly) that the world is dominated by a Western narrative as an outcome of the US global hegemony. What they fail to admit to themselves is that this also is the driving force behind press freedom increasing globally, because the natural state of affairs is for media to avoid stepping on toes, and they must admit that most of the outlets they've listed, including the Times of India, have taken blatant actions that would call their reliability into question.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...

[sdwa]

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.

[dash2]

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

[Bresenham]

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]

> 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...

[Mauricebranagh]

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]

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]

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]

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."

[swebs]

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.

[_v7gu]

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]

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]

> 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.

[alkonaut]

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.

[cainxinth]

You seriously think RT should be given the same credence as the BBC?

Now that's worthy of a laugh.

[fsflover]

> Fox News

Could be an error?

https://www.wired.com/story/why-wikipedia-decided-to-stop-ca...

[magnio]

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/Not...

[rstuart4133]

> 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.

[olau]

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)

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.

[circlefavshape]

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

[arp242]

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]

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