MIT Study Rates FOX News as Untrustworthy, Gives High Ratings to NY Times and WaPo
“Lay people across the political spectrum agreed with professional fact-checkers that hyperpartisan and fake news sites should not be trusted.”
It’s just fascinating how many of the most popular conservative sites are rated as hyperpartisan, but not the left wing ones.
Newsbusters reports:
MIT Study Attacks Fox News as ‘Not to Be Trusted’
The schools and studies that are shaping technology’s approach to fake news and censorship are biased in favor of the left.
A study released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened with the premise that readers should be able to determine what fake news is and isn’t. Readers were given the chance to rate how much they trusted certain sources, and their ratings were matched with those of professional fact checkers. Heritage’s The Daily Signal, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, The Daily Wire, Independent Journal Review, and RedState were all labeled “hyperpartisan and low quality.”
The definition of hyperpartisan news and low quality journalism in the study was just slightly above fake news. “Lay people across the political spectrum agreed with professional fact-checkers that hyperpartisan and fake news sites should not be trusted.”
On a scale of zero to one, with one being the highest score, sites like The New York Times and The Washington Post were at the top of the 60 sites chosen for analysis. Any score under .5 was considered a marker for “low quality journalism.” The fact-checkers even gave low scores to some of the mainstream sites. Fox News, The Daily Mail, and The New York Post were given scores under .5. This meant that the fact checkers found these outlets to be “overall untrustworthy.”
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Comments
I give that MIT study a rating of 0.01.
Confirmation bias?
Cool! Fake news about fake news!
The “MIT” co-author is at Sloan, which I don’t think really counts.
The abstract has this . . . well, interesting. . . statement—
Finally, we found that excluding ratings from participants who were not familiar with a given news source dramatically reduced the effectiveness of the crowd.
After sorting carefully through the multiple negatives, I think this translates as, “the less a person knows about a particular news source, the closer his opinion of its quality aligns with our own prejudices.” Or, “the less you know, the more likely we are to think you’re right.” Which pretty much shoots down the entire premise of the paper.
Seems consistent with the StoneyBrook study which showed that how smart someone thought that they were was inversely correlated with IQ. Smart people are aware of how much they don’t know.
Too bad. MIT used to be a pretty good school, once upon a time.