Wikipedia bans Daily Mail as 'unreliable' source for website
Source: The Guardian
Wikipedia editors have voted to ban the Daily Mail as a source for the website in all but exceptional circumstances after deeming the news group "generally unreliable".
The move is highly unusual for the online encyclopaedia, which rarely puts in place a blanket ban on publications and which still allows links to sources such as Kremlin backed news organisation Russia Today, and Fox News, both of which have raised concern among editors.
The editors described the arguments for a ban as "centred on the Daily Mails reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication".
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia but does not control its editing processes, said in a statement that volunteer editors on English Wikipedia had discussed the reliability of the Mail since at least early 2015.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia-bans-daily-mail-as-unreliable-source-for-website
DonViejo
(60,536 posts)I know the owners of the paper, my husband use to work for "her Ladyship"...really out of touch. They live in a bubble
Denzil_DC
(7,233 posts)It was all the rage here last year, especially for the latest "European immigrant atrocities."
Yeah, Rothermere's a peach - an expat who pays no UK tax, collects large Euro-subsidies for his vast UK landholdings, and owns a paper that's constantly railing against furriners and freeloaders and is rabidly pro-Brexit.
DonViejo
(60,536 posts)I never saw their home in England, just pictures; the home of Princess Dianna's bro looks like it, HUGE estate. Their home here in Massachusetts was also huge but, not as big as the one in England. Three people lived in the house here.
Denzil_DC
(7,233 posts)Is the list of LBN-acceptable sources published anywhere (I understand it would need to be updated)?
tenorly
(2,037 posts)Denzil_DC
(7,233 posts)The only one they forgot was the Mail's periodic, Chicken Little-style rants about "Argentina preparing to invade the Falklands."
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,681 posts)Unsourced rumors, sensational stories, and outright bullshit. They get cited a lot on DU, unfortunately, and I wish people wouldn't refer to them - or at least try to verify their stories (I've done it the past myself, and got bitten, and now I avoid them). One example was their recent report that SC candidate Gorsuch, while in high school, had created and presided over a "Fascism Forever" club. This story was enthusiastically repeated on DU and was also picked up by other sources, which apparently didn't do their own fact-checking but relied entirely on the Daily Mail story. But Snopes soon reported that the story was false. http://www.snopes.com/neil-gorsuchs-fascism-forever-club/ I'm not bringing this up as a fan of Gorsuch - I'm not - but I am a fan of the truth.
Denzil_DC
(7,233 posts)Link to tweet
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,681 posts)and call him "sad" and a "so-called judge"?
MacLaughlinComm
(12 posts)Given that most of what the Daily News 'reports' on are the supposed comings and goings of celebrities (and not following the U.S. laws re: paparazzi pictures of kids), I cant fault Wikipedia for this decision
mike_c
(36,281 posts)tenorly
(2,037 posts)It's nothing more than a series of op-eds that parade as something respectable merely because middle-class readers think they speaks for the elite.
Which is doubly absurd because even if they did, they're certainly not about to share anything useful.
BlueStater
(7,596 posts)When they're not publishing propaganda on behalf of the Cheeto King, they're obsessed with getting "sideboob" and "pert derriere" shots of female celebrities.
canetoad
(17,152 posts)From http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Daily_Mail
A traditionally conservative tabloid (by UK standards), the Mail is currently blaming the European Union and European immigration to Britain for the economic crisis in Britain. It likes to incite its readers against minorities with sensationalist headlines about the benefits immigrants receive and the threat they pose to British culture and security (almost always entirely founded on lies). It frequently reports that the country is "going to the dogs" and we're all going to die, while at the same time wondering why people are voting for the British National Party. Some British people find this amusing, as the Mail's editorial stances are indistinguishable from BNP policies. It is exceptionally rare for the main headline to be unlinked to asylum seekers or "dangerous" foreigners in some way or another, regardless of the context of the story. Such is the case with Mahira Rustam Al-Azawi, who would otherwise just be another case of long-term fraud if it wasn't for the Mail slanting it toward her being an Iraqi asylum seeker.[8][9]
While the Mail does prefer to blame it all on Johnny Foreigner, other popular editorial villains include gypsies, the workshy, Young People Today, the public sector, the BBC[10] (which, in full Fox News style, it says has a strong liberal bias),[11] and anyone to the left of Norman Tebbit. For much of the late 2000s, the Mail had a major obsession with house prices and how they change, in either direction. Recent drops in UK house prices have sparked massive rage and panic across Mail headlines and front pages, despite these drops being a mere fraction the size of the insane increases that have occurred over the preceding decade. The Daily Mail headline generator pokes fun at these obsessions, with many randomly generated headlines asking whether immigrants are lowering house prices.[12] For the last few years, the Mail has also been the leading voice in demonising anyone who claims social benefits for any reason whatsoever (while completely oblivious to the fact that the State Pension received by about 15m people is a social benefit), which has been shown to fuel stigma of the majority of genuine claimants, and discourage people who may need help from seeking it.[13]
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)And they LOVE Trump. If you really want to experience the dregs of humanity, read the comments.
muriel_volestrangler
(101,311 posts)Probably NSFW (concept rather than anything they show)
This started online, about 2000. Charlie Brooker has understood the modern media better than anyone.
canetoad
(17,152 posts)Brooker is very good. Wasn't that Catherine Tate?
muriel_volestrangler
(101,311 posts)Though she does have a wide variety of voices when needed, of course.
Denzil_DC
(7,233 posts)She's alarmingly versatile. Have you ever seen her foul-mouthed granny?
canetoad
(17,152 posts)A load of old shit
Denzil_DC
(7,233 posts)In 2015, James King described his experiences as a freelancer for MailOnline:
...
MailOnlinewhich has since changed its name to DailyMail.com in order to "make deeper inroads with ad firms on Madison Avenue," according to the Wall Street Journalhas been widely hailed as a blueprint for the future of online journalism. It reaches hundreds of millions of readers, and it has hired former BuzzFeed COO Jon Steinberg to help turn those gargantuan traffic numbers into profit. Earlier this year, DailyMail.com acquired U.S.-based site Elite Daily, the so-called "Voice of Generation Y."
The eager paradigm-proclaimer Michael Wolff used his USA Today media column last August to praise the Mail's business model as having succeeded where other, better-funded and more prestigious publications have failed. Under the headline "Daily Mail Solves Internet Paradox," Wolff lauded the publication's "180 million unique visitors a month" and suggested that if other publications want to survive the "digital migration" they should adopt a model similar to that of the Mail's.
What Wolff failed to acknowledge: the Mail's editorial model depends on little more than dishonesty, theft of copyrighted material, and sensationalism so absurd that it crosses into fabrication.
Yes, most outlets regularly aggregate other publications' work in the quest for readership and material, and yes, papers throughout history have strived for the grabbiest headlines facts will allow. But what DailyMail.com does goes beyond anything practiced by anything else calling itself a newspaper. In a little more than a year of working in the Mail's New York newsroom, I saw basic journalism standards and ethics casually and routinely ignored. I saw other publications' work lifted wholesale. I watched editors at the most highly trafficked English-language online newspaper in the world publish information they knew to be inaccurate.
http://tktk.gawker.com/my-year-ripping-off-the-web-with-the-daily-mail-online-1689453286
Corroboration came from two other freelancers:
Life at Mail Online in New York
...
Alex writes: In my memory, there wasnt a single story out of the hundreds I wrote that didnt come from another news site. You were assigned a story from a rolling list of links to other publications and then you rewrote it. You could do a little extra googling for other news sites to see if there were any extra facts, if you wanted. If there was a story without pics wed rarely do it, but if a news site such as a local ABC affiliate had a story on it, wed just take grabs from their videos. The worst was when, as King described, youd be assigned to rip off a really great article from say, The New York Times. A long form piece of exclusive journalism like that - its hard to make it your own, especially when youve got about an hour and a half in which to do it.
My headlines were frequently changed (often to include typos) to make them more salacious, and, as King wrote, often made factually incorrect. I was once berated for neglecting to include the words cheerleader in bikini in my headline. Anything involving race or breasts is a big hit with the Mail editors and getting Drudged (linked on the Drudge Report) was the ultimate compliment.
As far as Im concerned, everything James King wrote is true. I worked at the Mail at the same time he was there and I think he let them off easy!
M writes: I worked there from spring 2013 to July 2014, first as a freelancer and later as staff. James gives a pretty accurate account of how the newsroom works. Once you become staff you are expected to put in the occasional call to a police press officer or the actual subject of a story. However, with a high turnover of stories there was never time to wait for a call back - you normally have an hour and half to get the story link, rewrite it, add pictures and file. The more senior reporters do more traditional reporting and if there's a big story they will go out and cover it.
http://www.sub-scribe2015.co.uk/whistle-blowers.html