From some place I can’t recall I learned about a site called Ad Fontes Media, which has a figure called an Interactive Media Bias Chart that looks like this (click to enlarge):
On the X axis various sources are ranked for political bias, with “left” sources on the left (of course) and right-wing sources to the right. On the Y axis is a measure of credibility, with low scores on the bottom and high scores on the top. You’ll want to know how the rankings are done, and you can see that on this page. (You can also get digital downloads, which are free for educational, personal, and nonprofit use.)
You’ll want to enlarge the chart at the original site and see how your media sources rank. You can also search for a given media source (including television and other digital media).
The source with the most balanced coverage and also the most reliable appears to be USAFacts, to which you must subscribe (I ahven’t heard of it or seen it). The CBS Evening News and the Wall Street Journal are also given as credible centrist sources.
The politically extreme sources tend to be less credible, and that’s understandable, of course, for they slant the news. Among left-leaning and less credible sources are the PBS News Hour (surprise), but, even worse: Jezebel, and Jen Psaki on NBC. Then the left-wing sources go even more downhill to sites like Wonkette and the Tony Michaels Podcast.
Not credible right-wing sources include The Post Millenial and Fox and Friends, and, even more extreme and less credible (and not surprising) are Louder with Crowder and, of course, Alex Jones.
Scores are based on panels of three people rating individual articles, and I can’t seem to find an overall score for places like the New York Times, but here’s their chart, showing a left skew and moderate credibility (each dot is an article)
The Wall Street Journal shows, as indicated above, more centrist and credible news:
Reuters is left-centrist and pretty reliable:
The Washington Post, like the NYT, is also skewed left and not terribly credible:
I haven’t examined the methodology or overall scores for each source, but I’ll let readers do that for themselves. Anyway, it’s fun to play around with and see where your own news sources fall.
Interesting! I am going to check out.
Had not seen this before. Thank you!
Interesting. My favourite source—WSJ—rates pretty well.
I don’t follow anyone on either extreme.
Yeah, Reuters seems to push propagnda these days.
Yes, I was dubious about that one. I would have to dig deeper into the methodology to see what is going on.
Is it my old eyes but I don’t see the BBC in there, whereas there is Russia Today.
The chart is very hard to read on a iPhone. An accompanying list would be helpful.
USAFacts is an invention of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and has been around for a couple of years, quietly amassing data on all sorts of things. I worked at Microsoft for many years, and know Ballmer to be a “data guy.” It’s an interesting site. Maybe there’s a subscription available, but lots of stuff up there is free and open to anyone who visits.
Just piggybacking on your comment, Norm. In case anyone is interested, USAFacts has a channel on YouTube with videos on a wide variety of topics: health care, demographics, environment, etc.
I can’t vouch for how watchable or informative they are, as I just discovered the channel, but it might be worth checking out.
We’re pretty regular watchers of The CBS Evening News. Nora O’Donnell does a good job of hosting the show. They’ve been very balanced in their reporting from Gaza. Often alternating between Israeli storylines and Palestinian. I’d still say that a lot of the domestic reporting skews slightly left, which is then offset by a sufficient number of ideologically neutral, mostly human-interest type stories to draw an overall rating of center reliable.
A noteworthy thing about the chart is that it distinguishes between Fox News’ news show, Special Report w/ Bret Bowers, from the opinion shows, which are rated lower. Bowers, according to this chart, is the right of center counterpart to PBS’s left of center Newshour, each about equally reliable.
I’m happy to report that I’ve never heard of many of the bottom dwellers.
Why would a source with strong bias necessarily be correlated with reliability?
Is this a tautological chart in which by the very nature of the selection of the criteria it will produce this type of correlation?
In other words, a source that tends to publish more positive for the left / negative for the right (or vice versa) stories is automatically given a lower Y axis score because of the types of stories they publish rather than it being a matter of unreliable information?
For example, if a source published only stories about Trump being indicted, MTG saying stupid things, and Boebert making out in public, and they were factually accurate but without opinion, that would make the source hyper partisan but also highly accurate, so it would be in the upper left corner. I’m surprised by the strong correlation between accuracy and partisanship.
Personally, I mainly read WSJ, though I’ll listen to Pod Save America and Ben Shapiro podcasts occasionally to get a feel for some stronger points of view expressed in an intelligent manner. I make it a rule that if I listen to one of them, that I must listen to the other.
It seems obvious to me that the more you lean one way or another, the more biased you will be in covering the news, producing a printed “confirmation bias”. Or, perhaps, the degree of skew is taken as a sign of political extremist.
I do agree with you that we need to read sources that go against our political leanings, for reasons outlined by Mill in “On Liberty”.