>If you can‘t immediately spot the difference, you may be a late victim of post-modern relativism.

The claim is not that all news is equally true; that would be ridiculous. The claim is that lists of trusted sources are ripe for abuse by the list-makers.

Consider this evil plan: suppose that I put a grassroots issue blog on the same list as 100 fake publications. Everyone will believe me, because, look: I was right one hundred times! That problem can even arise without intentional evil on the part of the list makers, just look at the history of spam blacklists. People, even teams of people, are not one hundred percent just one hundred percent of the time.

(I just called something evil, and you can't get any less postmodernist than that! ;)

> suppose that I put a grassroots issue blog on the same list as 100 fake publications

Worth noting that PropOrNot already exists, and got a lot of positive coverage before people started to get suspicious. Its model was almost precisely what you describe: providing extensive lists of clearly Russia-affiliated sources like Sputnik News, then including a handful of high-quality domestic gadflies like Naked Capitalism without any justification.

This isn't just a hypothetical risk of such tools, its already an active problem on these exact topics.

The problem is if you don't have Russian propaganda then there is nothing to counteract the American propaganda.

Unfortunately most people in the US are not going to be able to believe that American propaganda exists.

Two falsehoods do not make a truth.

It's good to know both sides of the story.

The problem with that approach is that even the Daily Mail occasionally publishes something decent - e.g. this article on Clement Attlee:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3174009/DOMINIC-S...

If a clock's broken and thus is right only twice a day, is it a clock worth keeping? The Daily Mail made its bed and it should have to lie in it.

Sure, but every other major news source has also published something verifiably false. Pick your poison.

How about this metaphor: There are two burger joints. One consistently gets poor health code reviews, vermin in the preparation areas/mouse feces on the cutting board, etc. while another has a mostly clean rap sheet, only marred by a "missing a hair net" violation once every few years. Which one do you go to? Certainly they're not equivalent, right?

So two sources One is 95% truth, 5% they get wrong and apologise One is 95% lies, and 5% they get it right

Which do you read?

It depends on the impact of the lies. The Guardian's Mark Duggan headline was the subject of a PCC complaint awarded against them, see https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/23/pcc-guardian-m... This could have easily led to more violence. This week The Washington Post recently published the false narrative against a 16 year old boy approached by a native man at a protest (saying that he'd approached and threatened the man), resulting in thousands of violent threats against a child.

'Proper' journalism doesn't exist. Maybe it never did, it's just more obvious now. It's news entertainment.

Thorough documentation like that is key to a plugin like this maintaining trustworthiness. I think they should go even further and provide explicit examples highlighting the reasons behind a certain rating, as the more explicit, the harder for people to dismiss this as some kind of leftist filter.