Politico is owned by the german Axel Springer SE, a publisher that also owns Bild, Fakt (polish) and Welt among others.

The publisher and its news outlets (with the aforementioned Bild, Fakt and Welt most prominent) is a main driver for a news coverage and reporting that is jointly responsible for the rise of the far right in Germany and Europe.

Politico itself has published so-called Native Ads, a form of advertisng that is designed like op-ed articles and other opinion pieces in a way that is hard to differeentiate from regular, non-sponsored content, mostly for fossile fuel companies but also healt insurance, finance and weapons industries. (Source 1, Source 2).

That sums up to a news outlet that should not be shared, not be trusted and hence, not be posted here. It was not an issue mostly since this outlet wasn’t posted here often , but recently, Politico articles are getting posted very frequently again, so I suggest the ban now.

Edit: lost a word

Edit 2: it should be noted that there is another publisher with a similar name (Springer Nature with several subsidiaries), but that company os not affiliated with Axel Springer SE and has different issues.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 hours ago

      We’re keenly aware of Politico’s controversies when we use them as a reliable source. We consider them to have a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy, and sorry to say, we’re generally better at sussing that out than most people – not inherently but because that’s what years of writing encyclopedic prose does to a mf.

      • CyberEgg@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
        1·
        57 minutes ago

        In your list, Politico is classified as a reliable source specifically on the topic of american politics. This community is only about american politics when they are affecting Europe directly. And if I understand your definition of a reliable source correctly it is about whether events and relevant topics are mentioned and not about how they are framed, right? So take the facts out of sources but do not automatically accept the framing of the facts from the source, am I correct?

        Also, this isn’t only about the factuality and bias, it is also about denying Axel Springer the clicks.

        • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          15 minutes ago

          In your list, Politico is classified as a reliable source specifically on the topic of american politics.

          Yes, that’s correct. “Base” Politico is a publication about American politics. For European politics, we turn to the sister publication Politico Europe. We use Politico Europe all the time as a reliable source for European politics. The reason it’s not mentioned on that perennial sources list is because the list is for oft-discussed sources, and Politico Europe isn’t that discussed, mainly because “base” Politico has functionally the same reputation for accuracy and fact-checking and is therefore treated as a proxy.

          And if I understand your definition of a reliable source correctly it is about whether events and relevant topics are mentioned and not about how they are framed, right? So take the facts out of sources but do not automatically accept the framing of the facts from the source, am I correct?

          You have the right basic idea, but it’s more complicated than that. We acknowledge that literally every source we’re going to use has a bias; what we don’t tolerate is a source letting its bias interfere with factual accuracy – not just on the individual points but the cohesive whole of the work. Dishonest framing that takes verifiably true individual points and turns them into an inaccurate whole makes for a bad source, and we try not to use sources that do this.

          We also strongly examine conflict of interest, what other sources with good reputations for reliability are saying, etc. If we feel a biased source has reliability for accuracy, the rest falls more into our neutral point of view (NPOV) policy. It’s hard to summarize, because the RS and NPOV pages, despite their length, already summarize these source guidelines about as well as you can without stripping away important nuances.

      • Zombie@feddit.ukEnglish
        21·
        2 hours ago

        Is the average social media user capable of sussing out fact from fiction as rigorously though?

        This discussion is about their potential for propaganda and viewpoint manipulation on Lemmy after all, not as a citation in an encyclopaedia.

        Of their many daily articles how many would be deemed acceptable to Wikipedia and how many not? There must be a ratio where Wikipedia calls time. As Wikipedia only picks the parts that are relevant, the untrustworthy articles would be ignored. That’s not the case on social media though where some users are spamming articles as if it’s an RSS feed.

        As Lemmy/PieFed grows in users, the likelihood of bogus articles climbing up people’s feeds, legitimising the articles, also increases.

        This is an issue that needs nipped in the bud earlier rather than later IMO.