Context:
The article in question was well sourced, factually accurate, and written by a well-renowned author and journalist whose work appears elsewhere too, regardless of which outlet published it.
Nonetheless, Jordan Lund is once again blindly trusting a pro-zionist conservative outlet masquerading as a bias and fact checker that nothing from anywhere that criticizes the fascist apartheid regime can be reliable 🤦
That whole conversation is so weird. I went back and reread big sections of it, and it’s just… the conversation is off. Jordan says he can’t remove the bot, because the admins won’t allow it. Rooki says that’s definitely not true, so people ask Jordan about it… and he’s just silent. Not “oh I must have misunderstood” or anything else, just pretending that if he doesn’t say anything, no one will notice that someone asked him a question, and everyone will move on. And then there’s Rooki accepting the code for scanning Wikipedia’s sources… but totally missing the point that the MBFC sources are awful, and the WP reliable sources list is actually quite good, and deciding that MBFC and Ground News are what needs to be positioned front and center. Also seeming totally uninterested in the idea of improving the quality of the ratings in response to the clear consensus of the community with citations.
I checked the last of the stuff that MBFC bot posted, 4 months ago, and the little line where the Wikipedia rating had previously featured had been replaced to a link to the WP article about the source, missing the whole point of categorizing sources cleanly into bullshit/not bullshit or the point that certain sources (Newsweek) had clearly slid into unreliability over time, but were still allowed on the lemmy.world subs for some reason.
It’s just so strange. Someone had a conspiracy theory that one of the admins had an unannounced sponsorship deal with Ground News, and that was the whole reason behind the entire thing to drop a link to Ground News while misdirecting everyone into getting mad at MBFC or something. I have no idea. It was just weird.
I don’t envy the unpaid mod job, especially mods who work hard to be fair and honest. I get your disdain and distrust of mintpress too and I hope you’ll reconsider. They do source their articles very well, because they know their audience and we’re foolable, but not always.