Brits trust Wikipedia more than the BBC, "serious" newspapers

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Weird. There appears to be a mix of somewhat paranoid (a third donā€™t trust the BBC to tell the truth even ā€œa fair amountā€) and/or gullible (22 percent trust the Mail to tell the truth a fair amount?), not to mention ignorant (of the fact that anyone can edit Wikipedia and government/corporate/wildly-biased folk often do).

Iā€™d do a little correlation/causation with regards to a number of hot topics (leaving the EU, abolishing the monarchy, Scotland, etc) but that might make me seem biased ā€¦so Iā€™ll just whip up a page on Wikipedia instead. :slight_smile:

I wonder if the only way to achieve anything resembling unbiased reporting is through a collaborative model. I mean this in the abstract sense of bias - any one person can only see a situation from their perspective. One might speculate that if you aggregate all the perspectives you have something approaching an unbiased POV.

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Unfortunately, ā€˜unbiasedā€™ and ā€˜trustworthyā€™ can differ substantially. When journalists go down this path it frequently ends in ā€˜balanceā€™, where the objective of determining what happened is discarded as biased and replaced by quoting one side, finding someone who disagrees with the first quote to provide a second balance quote, and congratulating yourself on objectivity.

In the case of wikipedia, I know that I trust it more because I know that its bias apparently upset enough people to send them over to conservapedia where the risk of my having to see their edits is lower.

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Only if the model would be truly collaborative, which Wikipedia is not (e.g. look at the demographic breakdown). Of course, truly collaborative journalism is practically impossible because society itself is stratified, and the people on the bottom tend to get left out.

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Not recorded: How much the British public trust YouGov polls.

I would guess that there are a lot of people who trust the Mail/Express and donā€™t trust the BBC at the same time.

Interestingly they mention ITV News but not ITN, presumably they are not including Channel 4 News (I am finding them to be more trustworthy than the BBC at the moment)

Overly generous to ITV (and especially) the Mail and Express there.

Channel 4 news?

Very well put, and this is the only reason we have a ā€œdebateā€ about climate change - a tiny number of deniers get equal coverage. It makes me wonder why they donā€™t just go ahead and give equal time to the Green Cheese Theory of Moon.

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I donā€™t trust the mail, the express or the BBC.

Good response. Youā€™re exactly right - unbiased and trustworthy are completely different things. My opinion is that Wikipedia is biased and, quite frankly, not trustworthy for anything of any real concern. Not that it doesnā€™t have its place - it does! - but if I want trustworthy news Iā€™ll go to sources that I trust to a degree. For encyclopedic stuff - information on plants, birds, etc ā€¦Wikipedia is a great resource.

Please note that I said ā€œsourcesā€ and not ā€œsourceā€. Relying on the BBC (or anyone) solely for unbiased and trustworthy news and/or analysis thereof is simply unrealistic. I regularly read DW, Der Spiegel, TheNews.pl, the Canberra Times, France24, The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, The Telegraph (UK), and EUObserver.com ā€¦and thatā€™s just for the general news, not tech/science stuff and so on. Occasionally Iā€™ll include Haaretz and Al Jazeera if something is going on in the M-E and I want some more local POVs.

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Iā€™m the same, but I donā€™t trust the BBC for different reasons than the Daily Mail/Express. I havenā€™t blocked the BBC on my computers yet which says something (OK, there isnā€™t Kitten Block for the BBC yet, but the BBC does have itā€™s uses sometimes. The Mail/Express will only be useful if they use softer paper)

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