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Notes -
Wikipedia is deciding whether to discourage use of Fox News as a source in articles specifically for politics and science. As usual, please do not comment there unless you know your way around a Wikipedia discussion and can participate while following community standards.
In context: Wikipedia periodically holds discussions about the reliability of sources. It has a five-level ranking system for sources:
generally reliable
no consensus (= "we couldn't decide")
generally unreliable (= "usually don't use")
deprecated (= "never use")
blacklisted (= "never use", enforced in the wiki software)
The current discussion is about Fox News when it talks about the two topics of politics and science - for those topics, it is currently listed as "no consensus". For other topics, it is "generally reliable", and that status is not up for discussion here. Fox's talk shows are also listed separately as "deprecated" (= "never use"), and that status is also not up for discussion. There are 23 prior discussions listed about the reliability of Fox News for politics and science, starting in 2009 (although there may be more). This is the latest one.
Why this is relevant here: Wikipedia is a widely-used reference on the Internet (top ten websites globally, by number of visits) and Fox News is a well-known news source. The debate on whether Fox News is a reliable source for science and politics is thus likely to be of interest on this website.
Moving to the discussion itself: many points were raised of varying quality. There's quite a bit of back-and-forth and it's certainly not one-sided.
My take: while Fox is certainly useful for presenting facts that other sources don't, it's made factually incorrect claims that remain uncorrected. Those would make it difficult to use as the only source for a claim, and if you can't do that, what's the point. It can still be used for research while writing articles, like every other website on the Internet. As for the incorrect claims, various editors compiled lists of these; here's an 18-item list. I checked a few. Some were weak; some were worrying. For example, item 10 quotes from this Fox article: "PolitiFact appears to be shielding President Biden and Vice President Harris from criticism over their past rhetoric expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration". Here's the PolitiFact page. It shows that "expressing distrust in the coronavirus vaccine during the Trump administration" is a misleading construction: Biden and Harris repeatedly emphasize that they would take a vaccine approved by public health professionals, but would not trust the sole word of Trump. Fox phrases it as during the administration, they expressed distrust in the vaccine, in general, but this is simply not what they did. Why that's bad: one could write a sentence in an article with that claim, and cite it to the Fox article, and that would be incorrect. The Fox article was published July 2021 and has not been corrected.
My take, part 2: The optics might not be great, but at least Fox still counts as reliable for everything but politics and science. I don't think they're managing the optics enough. Of course, it's a decentralized and anti-hierarchical community, so the odds they'd organically do something like that are low.
Where we go from here: Editors are requesting that the discussion be "closed" by a neutral third-party editor (or panel of such editors), and that may happen sometime soon. Editors are still adding comments to the main discussion in the meantime. The "close" can be appealed to the community, but if the closer does a decent job this is unlikely.
My credentials: I've edited Wikipedia for a while. I usually don't touch the politics side much.
I was not previously aware of this event, but my guess is that this is an isolated demand for rigor. All of the major news outlets are biased and unreliable when it comes to politics and science, and have tons of skeletons in their closet regarding mistakes that have either not been retracted, or not retracted very publicly or noticeably. They probably all belong under "generally unreliable", and I would support Fox News being put there IF all of the other major news sources were subject to the same level of scrutiny and most of them placed in the same bin.
If it's being considered in isolation though, then I expect people to use this as an opportunity to discredit and censor right-wing positions by holding it to a higher standard than everyone else.
Anyone can start one of these discussions about a source at any time, although in practice you have to gauge community mood at least a little. The key question here is whether you can pick a sentence from an article within the given topic and be confident that it's factually correct, and that's what's being questioned for Fox's politics articles.
If someone managed to put together a big list for, say, the NYT, I'd like to see it and I'm sure the community would like to see it. I agree without reservations that all major news sources should be subject to the same level of scrutiny.
For what it's worth: BuzzFeed currently has the same "no consensus" rating as Fox, although honestly on the strength of far less well-attended discussions.
For what it's worth, part 2: A discussion on MSNBC was launched after the last big Fox News discussion, but nobody put in the same amount of effort to find instances of inaccuracies (only one person posted, and they posted a mistake in a headline, and it is known that headlines aren't written by the article authors and are thus junk - see WP:HEADLINE). Thus the discussion reaffirmed that MSNBC is unusable for opinion pieces, as all opinion pieces are, and is generally reliable most other times, with the caveat that they don't even have written reporting on their news site so it's a bit of a strange discussion to have. (They have lots of blogs, though, which are all not suitable for use by policy.) If someone came up with a similar list for another major news outlet, I'd expect it to be taken seriously. I can't immediately find any examples of someone dropping a large list in an RfC on a "famous" left-wing source, but there's plenty to look through on the main "source reliability" list.
Incredible how downvoted this is.
It's downvoted because it's well known by this point the protests of Wikipedia's fairness are hollow. There is no more good faith -- if you ask, people will provide you long lists of documented instances of Wikipedia's entrenched biases, they will show you literal years of arguments about it, of people well-known and not discussing it. Whether it's GamerGate, or Elevatorgate, or Trump, or Russia, consistently, very, very consistently, Wikipedia slants in the same direction, fights every attempt to appeal this bias to the quick, and demands an exorbitant amount of energy to police lest an activist editor immediately launch right back into the nonsense.
I'm sure pigeon is sincere and willing to help reform Wikipedia. Of course, someone else suggested some fixes to the KiwiFarms article, and the immediate response from the pro-Wiki side was "alright, that might actually be impractical".
But sure -- utterly capture an institution and then use the fact your detractors have realized they shouldn't bother with it as evidence it's not captured, because those goofy detractors aren't even trying to exhaust themselves against you.
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Faith in these discussions has been exhausted by years of previous conversations, and that bleeds through. I'd agree that it bodes poorly for the long-term health of the forum, which is why I've been pessimistic about this place's long-term prospects for quite some time now. On the other hand, it's lasted this long, so who knows?
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Agreed. Good-faith quality comments getting downvoted like this doesn't bode well. Does it have any effect in the new site, though?
Doesn't seem like it.
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