[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...