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[–] 88 points 5 days ago (14 children)

“Pink slime” describes sites that present themselves as legitimate news sources but in fact are funded — without any disclosure to readers — by political or ideological interests that are pushing an agenda.

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  • [–] 20 points 5 days ago (6 children)

    The term "pink-slime journalism" was coined by journalist Ryan Smith in 2012.[4] A related term, "news mirage", was coined in 2024 by journalists Miranda Green and David Folkenflik to refer to websites that "look like news, but in truth [serve as] mouthpieces" for corporations or advocacy groups with a non-journalistic agenda.[7]

    I'm still no closer to understanding why it's called pink slime

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  • [–] 7 points 5 days ago (5 children)

    It's a reference to Ghostbusters 2 and how people running those sites make everyone angry by spreading negativity

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  • [–] 5 points 5 days ago (3 children)

    Wait, are you fucking with me or is that real? I'm squinting at you so hard right now

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  • [–] 14 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Not so gullible after all are you.

    You are correct, it's actually a reference to highly processed "pink slime meat" made by taking low quality meat meat scraps, chemically sterilizing them within an inch of their life and forcing them through a fine mesh at high pressure, then forming the resulting homogenized slime into a shape that vaguely resembles a real cut of meat. You know, low quality hot dogs, chicken cutlets and nuggets, hamburger, that kind of thing. Stuff that is technically "meat" but mostly the stuff you'd only eat if you were desperate.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 days ago (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 4 days ago* (2 children)

    What trash news are you reading?

    There's loads of great independent news outlets in the US, that are run by people and don't accept money from corporations

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  • [–] -2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 child)

    tone it down.

    You reply this immediately attacking me by assuming I'm reading some "trash" below your standards. Implying that I'm too stupid to recognize it as trash, unlike you....

    Everyone thinks "their" news is the real, unbiased source. You are not immune to propaganda.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 days ago (3 children)

    I still fail to understand why so many people have so much trust in corporate LLMs to just give them the right answer to complicated questions.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 days ago

    Who ya gonna call?

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  • [–] 3 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    This is less about a chatbot having a political “bias” and more about the information pipeline it is exposed to. If low-quality partisan sites are copied, syndicated, and then fed back into retrieval systems, the model can make repetition look like corroboration. Provenance, date stamps, and showing the underlying sources matter; even a lightweight context log such as Contextpress is more useful than pretending the answer is source-free.

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