UPDATE 01/31/2017: Categorizing madworldnews.com as “Real” never felt quite right with us. At the time of the initial review, we had a binary grading system: either a site was real, or it was satire. Mad World News didn’t quite sit comfortably in that either-or system. Where do we place highly opinionated commentary sites that commented on real news?
But now that we’ve expanded to include ClickBait, Bias, and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ among the new labels, we’ve updated our own opinion of Mad World News.
In the strictest sense, Mad World News is not “Real”; rather, they are an extremely Right-biased news and opinion site, with a hefty dose of ClickBait conspiracy theories thrown in for good measure. You are urged to find additional sources on a particular story before believing Mad World News’s version of the story, 100%.
You can see our original assessment below.
The story that came to us for madworldnews.com was this one:
Fast Food Chain Bans Alcohol-Based Wet Wipes So Muslims Aren’t Offended
According to their site, they posted the story on 9-29-2014 at around 1:30pm.
If that is to be believed, then it was an hour later than The Telegraph (submitted to us on the same day) posted this story:
KFC leaves Muslims baffled after branch drops alcohol hand-wipes in halal mix-up.
The Mad World News story is an abridged version of The Telegraph’s story, but with added commentary on the state of Britain and its supposed super-sensitivity to PC.
Another recent story follows the same formula:
Hero Rescues Kid From Bully’s Attacks, But School Admin Label Him a Villain is a rehash of Chicago’s CBS local affiliate’s story (which you can read here), with some added commentary.
Mad World News says that their purpose is to “restore our constitutional republic to what the founding fathers envisioned and fight back against the liberal media” by “bringing you the truth and the stories that the mainstream media ignores” — never mind that 5 stories that we looked at were all covered by, you guessed it: mainstream media.
We’re marking this as Real, because as far as we can tell, MWN are simply highly opinionated with their commentary. And, while they are selective with the stories that they cull from, none of the stories we reviewed were Fox News‘ed. You’d want to be careful sharing MWN stories, though, because their agenda might lead them to misrepresent the facts in order to acquire more shares/clicks.
[Please note the updated review.]