Where’s your favorite information source stand on the political scale?
I’ve updated the following subjective chart based on information compiled from various sources and your feedback. Some sources have shifted left or right, others have been added including: ESPN, McClatchy, the Federalist, Conservative Review, Washington Monthly, Twitchy, Gateway Pundit and Conservative Treehouse.
Please note that outlets on left and right sometimes publish material that’s on the opposite side of the political spectrum, or that has no political leaning at all. The placement is based on perceived overall tone and audience. Position on the chart doesn’t necessarily imply credibility or lack thereof. Sources on far right and far left have, in many instances, produced excellent, factually correct information at times.
I have loosely placed more traditional information sources in the top half of the chart working down toward aggregators, fact-checkers, opinion sites and less news-related sources. (This posed some position challenges since most of traditional information sources are left-leaning.) I did not attempt to place individual programs or broadcasts.
Compiling such a chart is obviously difficult for many reasons, some of them having to do with space. The spacing should be considered relative and not an indicator of absolute position. A number of the information sources technically belong on top of one another.
You have contributed terrific ideas, such as sizing boxes based on audience, and dividing into quadrants. This is a work in progress. Thanks for your input!
Think a source should be moved? Want one added? Leave a comment!
For a larger view, click on the image and enlarge.
Alternate charts and opinions:
https://www.infowars.com/alternate-reality-viral-propaganda-chart-demonizes-independent-media/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com
Preorder “The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think and How You Vote.”
Looks about right, but in all honesty I’m much more familiar with right side than left, except for NYT, which I just cannot give up regardless of how insanely liberal it gets. Do read several of the major sources on left but usually get there via RealClearPolitics, which is doing its job right smack in the middle!
I would have put Reason.com in its own chart (orbit). Love it but hard for me to fit it into left or right category.
Just about spot on. I think Buzzfeed should go further left and Dailymail a little further right but aside from that it’s the best chart I’ve seen on the internet
Looks accurate with the notable exceptions of both Rolling Stone and Mother Jones which should be depicted even further to the Left.
WSJ should be center.Yes the Hill has gone left.
Great graphic. Probably important to gravitate toward sources on or closer to the center to help in the search for truth.
The Washington Post should be much further left. Practically unreadable at this point.
I think the important thing here is that news shouldn’t isn’t biased, its simply news. It should be reported by all sources objectively to the best of the rep9orters ability leaving the interpretation and conclusions to the reader or viewer.
WSJ is closer to the center (at least their news is). The Hill has moved much further left. I don’t think InfoWars and Zero Hedge even belong on here – they are not really media. Also, the Economist is definitely left of the center line. It is sad to see the Atlantic so far left. They were just slightly left of center when I first started reading it.
Size boxes in relation to size of reported audience size. Or use some value in the boxes or color code them.
Yes! That is what is missing in how they are displayed. I was wondering if the ones at the top had more viewers than those down below, but I suspect Infowars, for example, is one of the largest that way, so would be good to know and see.
I would not have put CNN so far left, nor the Blaze so far right myself
Infowars doesn’t count as a journalistic enterprise, just the after affect of trump’s colon
Great work on media bias chart! Weasel Zippers should be added to beef up the right side of the chart. http://www.weaselzippers.us.
I just saw a website. Which I can’t recall, that has snopes more center.
I am a “conspiracy” believer with respect to media. What do I mean by that? I mean that the US government has enormous clandestine influence over most of the world’s media today. The US government felt a patriotic imperative to control and manipulate the spread of information during WWII as part of the war effort. After WII, Frank Wisner took over that effort and kept expanding it, first as part of the “Directorate of Plan” and then within the CIA. The media people who were witting to the extent of US government influence were the media owners – people like Henry and Claire Booth Luce, Eugene Meyer, William Paley, Arthur Sulzberger, etc. and the exec editors they hired. This control allowed outlets of record to carry & promote stories that the CIA/DOD approved of and kill or deemphasize the ones that it did not. Media consolidation into a small handful of conglomerates has increased the level of control over time – e.g. a young Rupert Murdoch was already a media partner of CIA/MI6 in the overthrow of the liberal government of Australia in 1975; his ascendancy to a worldwide media empire is linked to that partnership. Today, defense contractor General Electric owns NBC. The ratings of the news divisions on the media network are relatively incidental to the busines fortunes of the conglomerate. The allegations about “Operation Mockinbird”, Carl Bernstein’s Rolling Stone writeup on the discoveries of the Church Commission, and similar sources are only the tip of the iceberg in the true story of clandestine influence of US government on media. Examples of the extent of control: 1964 censorship of all publications questioning the official story of JFK assassination, complete media blackout of the civil trial and verdict related to the murder of MLK, unquestioning acceptance of the completeness of the story that a mega-pro team of CIA linked burglars just happened to get arrested while leaving clues at Watergate and that FBI #2 Mark Felt just happened to pick intel-linked Woodward for secret communications about Nixon’s coverup because that was the only way the FBI’s #2 could do things, hadly any public mention of the known fact that Reagan gave Saddam chemical weapons to use against Iran, no discussion of the long history of US sponsorship for terrorism in Latin America, pretending that long CIA history of narcotics running is just a theory and not well documented in 100s of places over decades….and recent acceptance of story that “Russian hacked the 2016 election” even though the story barely made sense to begin with, and ALL US govt. endorsed evidence for it has been publicly debunked as evidence pointing to Russia.
What do I read? I mostly focus on liberal vs. conservative. I focus on the smaller sites that are independent of US propaganda influence. My current list is on this downloadable page, which has RSS, WWW, and Twitter URLs: https://www.mediafire.com/file/15vubeeh3fxamcc/IndyNewsRSS.html Using RSS is the easiest way to keep up.
BI a bit further left,but overall seems pretty fair to me
Is The Federalist in there ?
I believe I see Business Insider shown twice.
CSM further right.
AP, Snopes & Buzzfeed further left.
When there is this much space/time to fill, content MUST be *generated*.
WSJ should be closer to the center. FOX farther right. CNN farther left. I would probably bring NR closer to Middle as well. InfoWars not even on the chart as they are same league as grocery store tabloids. This is a fun chart that should continue to grow. Add the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to the left side.
I used to think that InfoWars was just a conspiracy theory site that had no validity or facts to any of their assertions. But over the last year we’ve seen many of their stories proven to be true primarily through WikiLeaks and Guccifer2.0. I still find myself taking things that they report with a grain of salt but it many cases I find that the news that they report makes more sense logically than the stories that are reported on the MSM from both sides of the aisle. The main thing that hurts their credibility is that Alex Jones goes off the rails at times and flips out in addition to constantly interrupting his guests. The fact that Mike Cernovich is becoming a regular guest on the program is only helping to solidify their position as a more credible news outlet. If one wants to challenge Cernovich’s credentials and cite the 60 Minutes story then all I can ask is why wont 60 Minutes release their entire unedited interview with him? What do they have to hide?
I agree with a previous post, ESPN has become a liberal news channel that uses sports to frame the narrative. I’ve almost completely quit watching unless my alma mater is playing… ESPN should be far left represented.
The chart makes it look like news outlets are roughly evenly split, which they aren’t. Take the center line and move 1/4 the way to the right – that would be one way to do it. But specifically… Reuters is in the middle?? (absolutely freaking not) as is UPI??.. Fox is nowhere near that conservative, they should be toward the center. NYP and WSJ are not that conservative… Mediaite and FactCheck.org need to be further to the left… CNN is no longer a news organization <–seriously.
Agreed. The line should be moved a quarter to the right.
That said, the overall distribution is very good (well done!) even though, as many point out, defining left vs right is increasingly tricky since there is also establishment versus nationalist, and reasonably factual vs out-and-out propaganda. Fox News is tricky. Generally, they have many voices which don’t buy knee-jerk liberal views on social issues. In terms of anything to do with war, they follow whatever the Guvmint tells them to follow (as do CNN). The stars at night are opinionated and expressively so (as is Rachel Maddow who has a doctorate from Oxford in politics I believe) but all three tend to be good at providing quite a bit of substance with their polemic which most of their competition on the other side of the chart do not, so I believe there is some truth to the observation that the stuff on the right tends to be more reality based versus agenda-ideology based.
I have a different way of measuring all this, I call it my BS meter. For example, day-time Fox is about 70% BS. Night-time is around 75% with military-govt stuff but more like 25% with most other topics. Whereas CNN is pretty much 75% or more BS all the time in terms of what they select and how they cover it.
I came here from American Thinker. It’s a good online magazine with a lot of very intelligent offerings.