And, that problem of starting from a super-slanted perspective bleeds into their assessment of “factual”. Outlets are dubbed as low factualness if they write true stories that make Israel look bad, if they then take the step of adding to them editorially “and that is why Israel is bad.”
And, the assessment of reliability is based on picking out randomly anecdotal individual articles / claims and then doing a very substandard job of assessing their truthfulness, so outlets that write a ton of stories or that report breaking stories or that have video content with free-form conversations can get randomly dinged for one dubious thing that someone said on a panel show, or one breaking story from 10 years ago that turned out not to be true in retrospect. Whereas an outlet like sciencetoday where every single article is just sort of half-assedly rewritten from some primary source usually with a few exaggerations or misleading framings in EVERY SINGLE ONE, is perfectly factual, because look, it’s based on a science paper, and those are never wrong.
And, yes, they’re trying to represent the US political spectrum where the NYT is “left center” but the US political spectrum is so badly tilted that half the stuff has fallen off the table and it’s not even possible to use it as a coherent scale at this point.
And they don’t rank some smaller outlets where it actually kind of would be useful to have a ranking, because that would be work
Other than that it’s a fine idea
I won’t say I 100% disagree, but it is a hard thing. It’s like the Coast Guard rescuing someone when they ignored every warning and put themselves in danger - it’s like yeah they definitely shouldn’t do that but also if you have the capacity to rescue them, and if you don’t they will literally die on your watch while you sit at home. I get the idea of saying fuck it and going and bailing them out, even if it is costly to do it.
It’s good for US journalists to go into authoritarian countries and report, just like they do for war zones and other dangerous places. It’s bad for US Marines to hear all this stuff about putting their life on the line for their country when they know they are Marines just sitting in Russian prison and the US isn’t doing a thing to try to get them out (whatever stupidity it was that wound up getting them put there).
I think it’s also kind of national pride - like it makes us look like chumps if there are Americans sitting in prison that shouldn’t be there and we’re just not doing anything about it.
Like I say I won’t say I 100% disagree with you but there are other factors involved than just whether or not the person put themselves at risk on their own.