What?
Thanks to COVID downtime, I created Iffy.news and its Index of Unreliable News Sources. The index compiles news sites with low factual-reporting levels, as determined and documented by Media Bias/Fact Check. Each site in the index links to its MBFC review and to a fact-check search of its articles.
The goal is to give researchers a more complete, current, and accurate dataset of sites that spread mis/disinformation, which will lead to more accurate disinformation research. See The Iffy Evolution for the history of this project and its Poynter past.
I hope researchers find it useful. It’s been used in several misinfo tools, research papers, and health-media/guides.
As time permits, I’ll contact Iffy-indexed publishers to give them an opportunity to respond. Next up for Iffy, a couple nearly finished research projects:
- Who funds fake news?
- How fake news whac-a-molests the web.
The anti-bullshit battle has begun.
Who?
My name is Barrett Golding. I am the former executive producer of the (NPR-distributed, Peabody Award-winning) Hearing Voices series, a Reynolds Journalism Institute and United States Artists fellow, and a WordPress contributor. I’ve researched and written for Current, RJI, PBS MediaShift, Transom, and Hacks/Hackers.
More re:me at GitHub, LinkedIn, and @hearvox. My related projects:
- Fact-check Feed (articles by US fact-checkers, 2016–present)
- Fact-check Search tool
- News Netrics media site performance metrics
- Unreliable News repo
- CredScore (hypothesis)
Iffy’s Editor is Josef Verbanac, a twenty-plus year veteran of teaching English in higher ed. He specialized in composition, technical writing, and online learning. Now semi-retired, he blue-lines for grocery money, serves as on-call caretaker for his family, and teaches parents to play D&D with their kids.
All Iffy.news data, documents, scripts, and software are released free and open-source (MIT License).
Contact
Eli 5 Stone created the Iffy logo.