Mass Media and Journalism

Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC), founded in 2015, is an independent online media outlet. MBFC is dedicated to educating the public on media bias and deceptive news practices.

MBFC’s aim is to inspire action and a rejection of overtly biased media. We want to return to an era of straight forward news reporting.

MBFC follows a strict methodology for determining the biases of sources. Dave Van Zandt is the primary editor for sources. He is assisted by a collective of volunteers who assist in research for many sources listed on these pages.

Media literacy helps us understand, analyze and create media. While we rely on good journalism to provide accurate information, we also have responsibilities of our own in this media-saturated environment. We can no longer be passive consumers of media. We need to be active users of media, as readers, listeners, viewers and creators, so we are all better informed. Our goal is to help you do just that.

Never before has the need for News Literacy been more urgent. As news consumers are bombarded with a constant stream of fake news, propaganda, hoaxes, rumors, satire, and advertising — that often masquerade as credible journalism — it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. While the public’s faith in the news media erodes, purveyors of misinformation have helped give rise to troubling cultural trends and alarming political movements.

The Journalism Trust Initiative aims at a healthier information space.
It is developing indicators for trustworthiness of journalism and thus, promotes and rewards compliance with professional norms and ethics.

JTI is led by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in partnership with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the Global Editors Network (GEN) and Agence France Presse (AFP).

(Copied from website)

Information Resistance is a non-governmental project whose main task is to counteract in the information field external threats arising for Ukraine in the main areas: military, economic and energy, as well as in information security.

It is a website offering news and analysis of overall Russian aggression against Ukraine, including disinformation components. It conducts analysis and fact-checking on disinformation in Ukraine related to military, economic, energy, and security.
(Copied from website)

We are a joint team of engineers and investigators from CERTH-ITI and Deutsche Welle, trying to build a comprehensive tool for media verification on the Web. The Media Verification Assistant features a multitude of image tampering detection algorithms plus metadata analysis, GPS Geolocation, EXIF Thumbnail extraction and integration with reverse image search via Google.

A new way to assist in evaluating the credibility of media sources

Iffy.news maintains a list of unreliable news/info sites, linked to site-ratings and fact-checks. This WikiCred project will add Wikipedia data to the index, contribute to related Wikipedia articles, and find indicators (via the Wikimedia API) to help programmatically identify fake news sites.

(Copied from website)

Social media sites and search engines have become the de facto gatekeepers of public
communication, a role once occupied by publishers and broadcasters. With this new role come
public responsibilities, including limiting the spread of misinformation.

In the last few years, the Social Media having a wider reach and faster, started polluting human minds by anti-social elements, wrong doers, pranksters etc. Several lies are so sugar coated that one never even attempts to use the sixth sense “Common Sense” and ultimately gets affected. Our country may get different leaders/Prime Ministers but until the people have an unbiased, logical mind, getting rid of the tag “Third World Country” seems a far cry.

Serves as a center for clarification of issues suspected to be hoaxes. For example, the Hoax Crisis Center (HCC) became the main hub to communicate issues that emerged during the last 2018 regional election to the public.

Regional journalists - with key connections to influential community leaders - volunteer with MAFINDO, and largely run the HCC. Community leaders know to contact the HCC first if there is an outbreak of a hoax, and the HCC coordinates with stakeholders (government, community and religious leaders) to calm the situation.