Having issues with the QUOTE function on my tablet, but trying to reply to @Dierdre post directly above.
Strongly agree that both flagging
Opinion pieces and practicing
proper journalism will solve a lot of the problems. A couple of years ago, I was fed up with the amount of complete garbage news articles in my various aggregated (like news.google and news.yahoo, etc.) and direct/creators like MSNBC, CBS, FOX, etc.) and decided to create a web crawler that would rate them by journalistic standards. My first step was completely manual.
I had a list of 6 sites (top 6 from a web search for most popular news sites) that I visited every day at a specific time each day and read and rated the first “N” articles on each site. They were scored by whether the article covered the basics of: who, what, when, where, why, and how. The ideas was to score one point for each “hit”, which would tell you how well they covered their topic. The scores were supposed to roll up to a site score for reliability.
After a week, I had to rethink the testing methodology because NOT ONE of the articles contained more than 3 or 4 of the basic, required elements that I learned in journalism class. The new categories added scores for things like: thinly-veiled-advertisements-masquerading-as-news, stubs (intro paragraph with a link to find out more), clickbait, person-bashing, copied/repeated from another article, no links to sources of claims, and on and on and on.
The research stopped after the second week because none of my news sources had produced a single news article that met my primary journalistic rating criteria. In other words, not a single article met the criteria that I had to meet when I wrote articles for the school newspaper ‘way back in 19~~. The project to identify adherence to journalist integrity was pointless and trying to identify clickbait through programmatic means was beyond my scope.
My conclusion is that, while there are sites with journalistic integrity, they are not those that are most popular. The click-bait approach to journalism has dramatically lowered the amount and quality of information in our online media. Correspondingly, countering the need for clicks with facts is a challenging problem. Metabunk and
@Mick West interview outreach are excellent. Google search results often drive people to this site which makes every attempt to focus on facts. A concerted effort on the part of the Metabunk community to comment on online articles and link to Metabunk threads will surely, gradually, increase the knowledge base of the media, but it’s a long, arduous journey.
To tie this back to the topic, referral to, and referencing of, threads here is probably the best definition of “expectations low”. If this site, or any others like it, makes anyone think twice about bunk, then it has been worthwhile.