Update: Since I reposted this expose of Media Bias Fact Check, Van Zandt decided to give the Sentinel the worst possible and false rating, He originally rated my site “highly factual”. He started to downgrade based on other far-left fact checkers. Now he has the site in the depths.
Following is an example of the dangerous threat to free speech that we currently face – the fake news industry. We have been victimized here at the Sentinel but it’s not the first time.
The Sentinel is just a small website with a quarter-million to a half-million to a million readers a month. If we are under threat, can you imagine the enormous power and venom behind the movement to silence the opposition?
As an example, two years ago, we did a series of articles on behalf of ranchers in Texas losing their land in a government land grab. We received threats and traced the threats to the offices of the Bureau of Land Management. After that, the head of the Oklahoma BLM office contacted me to do an interview. I researched him and was very concerned about the type of person he is so I declined the interview.
We were recently concerned about a rating given by a website called media bias fact check and included them among the many scammers rising out of the new and lucrative “fake news” fact-checking industry. However, we are revising this article because the editor of the site revised his rating of the Sentinel to the more appropriate designation of right-bias.
As we note in our mission statement, The Sentinel provides news, opinion, commentary, analysis, factual and original content, mostly political, usually right-of-center, for a Conservative, Libertarian, or Republican audience.
We are not a news agency and have never claimed to be but we do a great deal of research and rely on mainstream media.
We use more than one mainstream source for most articles, always provide links and readers have to decide whether they agree or not. We trust our readers.
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If Republicans, Conservatives, and Libertarians aren’t allowed to post news commentary and analysis without being unfairly vilified, can we still call ourselves the USA?
FAKE POLL
Anyone and everyone can vote on the MediaBiasFactCheck website in the poll and do so as many times as they want.
We clicked on the website last week and out of 41 people voting, 32 classified Sentinel as “extreme right”, and the remaining voters classified Sentinel as right-center, least-biased, left-center, and extreme left. The Sentinel can’t be all those things.
This is a Conservative/Libertarian website.
One person voted for the Sentinel as “right-center” over and over until “right-center” took the lead. The poll only judged the majority votes and one person can vote as many times as one chooses.
This is how it looked as of 4 pm EST on May 14, 2017:
The idea of any random, anonymous person deciding something like this subjectively, while pretending they’re objective, is unAmerican.
Some days I can vote repeatedly and some I can’t. Such a reliable poll! [sarcasm here]
Classifying Sentinel as “Questionable” took only 32 votes and they could have been from one person. The final judge is likely this one man though he lists three left-wing loons as judges.
Who are these people to decide subjectively who is right, left, extreme or not? The readers have the right to do that. Next, they’ll be burning books. The left already bans books and changes the words in Mark Twain’s books. They’re even tearing down monuments. They would make old Joe Stalin proud.
The anti-free speech bloggers are trying to silence people with whom they disagree.
Zerohedge has already reviewed Media Bias Fact Check and we are posting his review below.
Media Bias Fact Check
MediaBIasFactCheck.com describes itself as “the most comprehensive media bias resource on the Internet.” The site is owned by Dave Van Zandt from North Carolina, who offers no biographical information about himself aside from the following: “Dave has been freelancing for 25+ years for a variety of print and web mediums (sic), with a focus on media bias and the role of media in politics. Dave is a registered Non-Affiliated voter who values evidence-based reporting” and, “Dave Van Zandt obtained a Communications Degree before pursuing a higher degree in the sciences. Dave currently works full-time in the health care industry. Dave has spent more than 20 years as an armchair researcher on media bias and its role in political influence.”
WND was unable to locate a single article with Van Zandt’s byline. Ironically, the “fact-checker” fails to establish his own credibility by disclosing his qualifications and training in evaluating news sources.
Asked for information concerning his expertise in the field of journalism and evaluating news sources, Van Zandt told WND: “I am not a journalist and just a person who is interested in how media bias impacts politics. You will find zero claims of expertise on the website.”
Concerning his purported “25+ years” of experience writing for print and web media, he said: “I am not sure why the 25+ years is still on the website. That was removed a year ago when I first started the website. All of the writing I did was small print news zines from the ’90s. I felt that what I wrote in the ’90s is not related to what I am doing today so I removed it. Again, I am not a journalist. I simply have a background in communications and more importantly science where I learned to value evidence over all else. Through this, I also became interested in the research of all kinds, especially media bias, which is difficult to measure and is subjective to a degree.”
WND asked: Were your evaluations reviewed by any experts in the industry?
“I can’t say they have,” Van Zandt replied. “Though the right-of-center Atlantic Council is using our data for a project they are working on.”
Van Zandt says he uses “three volunteers” to “research and assist in fact-checking.” However, he adds that he doesn’t pay them for their services.
Van Zandt lists WND on his “Right Bias” page, alongside news organizations such as Fox News, the Drudge Report, the Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Wire, the Blaze, Breitbart, Red State, Project Veritas, PJ Media, National Review, Daily Caller and others.
“These media sources are highly biased toward conservative causes,” Van Zandt writes. “They utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports and omit the reporting of information that may damage conservative causes. Sources in this category may be untrustworthy.”
His special notes concerning WND link to Snopes.com and PolitiFact.com, websites that have their own questionable reputations and formulas as so-called “fact checkers.” (See the “Snopes” and “PolitiFact” entries below.)
Van Zandt says he uses a “strict methodology” in determining which news sources are credible, but his website offers vague and typo-ridden explanations of his criteria, such as the following:
Asked if his own political leanings influence his evaluations, Van Zandt said: “Sure it is possible. However, our methodology is designed to eliminate most of that. We also have a team of 4 researchers with different political leanings so that we can further reduce researcher bias.”
Bill Palmer of the website Daily News Bin accused Van Zandt of retaliating when the Daily News Bin contacted him about his rating. Palmer wrote:
“[I]t turns out Van Zandt has a vindictive streak. After one hapless social media user tried to use his phony ‘Media Bias Fact Check’ site to dispute a thoroughly sourced article from this site, Daily News Bin, we made the mistake of contacting Van Zandt and asking him to take down his ridiculous ‘rating’ – which consisted of nothing more than hearsay such as ‘has been accused of being satire.’ Really? When? By whom? None of those facts seem to matter to the guy running this ‘Media Bias Fact Check’ scam.
“But instead of acknowledging that he’d been caught in the act, Van Zandt retaliated against Daily News Bin by changing his rating to something more sinister. He also added a link to a similar phony security company called World of Trust, which generates its ratings by allowing random anonymous individuals to post whatever bizarre conspiracy theories they want and then letting these loons vote on whether that news site is ‘real’ or not. These scam sites are now trying to use each other for cover, in order to back up the false and unsubstantiated ‘ratings’ they semi-randomly assign respected news outlets. …
“‘Media Bias Fact Check’ is truly just one guy making misleading claims about news outlets while failing to back them up with anything, while maliciously changing the ratings to punish any news outlets that try to expose the invalidity of what he’s doing.”
But Van Zandt accused Palmer of threatening him, and he said MediaBiasFactCheck welcomes criticism. If evidence is provided, he said, the site will correct its errors.
“Bottom line is, we are not trying to be something we are not,” he said. “We have disclaimers on every page of the website indicating that our method is not scientifically proven and that there is [sic] subjective judgments being used as it is unavoidable with determining bias.”
Read the rest of Zerohedge’s article about FAKEST FACT CHECKERS ON THE INTERNET on this link.
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