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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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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.

Most mainstream sources can be trusted to report certain types of basic facts accurately: If CNN, Fox, or any other source says that Biden gave a speech on the White House lawn on September 16th, 2022, you can reasonably assume it to be true. If they report a quote from a named source, you can reasonably assume that the source made the statement (thought it may certainly be taken out of context).

On the other hand, all such sources are extremely unreliable in terms of interpretation. If Fox reported that Biden gave an "authoritarian" speech on the White House lawn on September 16th, 2022, you can be reasonably sure that he gave the speech, but the "authoritarian" claim should be regarded with suspicion. Similarly if CNN called the speech "unifying."

The quote you included, ""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," is clearly interpretation and therefore unreliable. Every mainstream new source is unreliable on this sort of "fact." That doesn't mean Fox invents fake speeches on the White House lawn, or lies about quotes from named sources, etc.

This is really important nuance which I wish Wikipedia editors would be more appreciative of. A lot of editors are addicted to the simplicity of a red light/yellow light/green light system, and will therefore wholesale eradicate any citations to sources marked "generally unreliable", even if they're being used to cite basic pieces of info like the date of a speech or a direct quote, which no-one would seriously consider it plausible for that source to falsify.

Normally you can just find the same information cited in a "green" source, but it becomes a real problem when dealing with topics that are mostly being covered by right-wing outlets.

"How to use this list":

Context matters tremendously when determining the reliability of sources, and their appropriate use on Wikipedia. Sources which are generally unreliable may still be useful in some situations. For example, even extremely low-quality sources, such as social media, may sometimes be used as self-published sources for routine information about the subjects themselves. Conversely, some otherwise high-quality sources may not be reliable for highly technical subjects that fall well outside their normal areas of expertise, and even very high-quality sources may occasionally make errors, or retract pieces they have published in their entirety. Even considering content published by a single source, some may represent high-quality professional journalism, while other content may be merely opinion pieces, which mainly represent the personal views of the author, and depend on the author's personal reliability as a source. Be especially careful with sponsored content, because while it is usually unreliable as a source, it is designed to appear otherwise.

Consider also the weight of the claims you are supporting, which should be evaluated alongside the reliability of the sources cited. Mundane, uncontroversial details have the lowest burden of proof, while information related to biomedicine and living persons have the highest.

Like you, I wish the average Wikipedia editor cared more about those rules.

Even the existence of the list itself is controversial in the community, precisely for the reason you articulate: that it tempts people towards a simpler system that does damage when applied in the real world.