Yes, that seems about right. I'd add in the Independent probably towards the upper part of the grey circle, and so far my experience of the Atlantic has been more towards the reputable-conservative than reputable-liberal. I don't think I've ever encountered any of the sources in either of the bottom corners though.
Detailed explanatory post here : https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-reasoning-and-methodology-behind-the-chart/
“Quality” itself is an incredibly subjective metric. I figured a good middle category to start with would be journalism that regularly meets recognised ethics standards the profession, such as those set by the Society of Professional Journalists. http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp. Above and beyond that, I determined that factors that can make a particular article or broadcast “higher quality” include 1) a high level of detail, 2) the presence of analysis, and 3) a discussion of implications and/or complexity. So I created the categories of “Analytical” for sources that have 1) detail and 2) analysis, and “Complex” for sources that regularly have the discussions of 3) implications and/or complexity. To read the “Complex” and “Analytical” sources, you often have to be familiar with facts learned from sources ranked lower on the vertical axis. However, complexity is not always a good thing. Sometimes, real issues get obscured with complex writing.
Then, I considered what makes a news source “lower quality.” One of the factors is simplicity. Simplicity CAN lead to “low quality” if a deep issue is only covered at a very surface level. Simplicity is fine for stories like “a man robbed a liquor store,” but it’s often bad for, say, coverage of a complex bill being considered by your state legislature. There are sources that cover complex stories (e.g, Hillary e-mail stories, Drumpf foundation stories, and really, most political stories) in a VERY simple format, and I think that decreases civic literacy. Therefore, I created a below-average quality category called “Basic AF.” However, simplicity is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes you need “just the story.”
Sorting sources based on partisan bias was a bit more straightforward, but I wanted to differentiate between the level of partisan bias. The categories are fairly self-explanatory. They are also the most highly debatable. Good arguments can be made as to whether a source is minimally partisan, “skews” partisan, or is “hyper” partisan. The “Utter Garbage/Conspiracy Theories” category is for those sources that “report” things that are demonstrably false and for which no apology or retraction is issued in the wake of publishing such a false story. These stories may include, for example, how the Obamas’ children were stolen from another family (on the right), or that the government is purposely poisoning us and changing the weather with chemtrails from aeroplanes (on the left). For the most part, even the “hyper-partisan” sites try to base their stories on truth (e.g., Occupy Democrats, Red State), and are held to account if they publish something demonstrably false. Generally, the closer a source is to the middle on this chart, the more they are taken to task by their peers for publishing or reporting something false.
The categorisation of a source in the hyper-partisan or even utter garbage category does not mean that every story published there is false. Many articles may just be very opinionated versions of the truth, or half-truths. And occasionally, sometimes a hyper-partisan or garbage site will stumble upon an actual scoop, due to their willingness to publish stories that haven’t been sourced or verified. Their classification in these categories is mainly because they are widely recognised by other journalists as regularly falling short of standard journalism ethics and practices.
[This got quite a bit a bit of criticism, not entirely unjustly. Still I think the struggle to understand our own biases is a very important one and one shouldn't expect - almost by definition - to be able to get things right on the first draft, otherwise there'd be no need for such a chart at at all ! A substantially updated version can be found here : https://www.adfontesmedia.com/intro-to-the-media-bias-chart/]
https://twitter.com/vlotero/status/808696317174288387
Nope it is not balanced and not symmetric. The whole centre part should be one and a half lines left.
ReplyDeleteI've got the impression the Indy has been dropping rapidly from being about the middle of the grey oval to now somewhere in the grey circle.
ReplyDeleteThe world according to a liberal. They're blind to their own bullshit.
ReplyDeleteI come across a lot of articles from PoliticusUSA here on g+, and believe it belongs squarely in the lower left area.
ReplyDeleteTrue, the Indy has become very, very angry indeed since Brexit. I used to subscribe to it on my Kindle, not so very long ago, and it was truly independent and non-partisan. I always liked how its lead headline was about something very important that none of the other papers covered.
ReplyDeleteIf I were to add other major papers, I'd put the Sun more or less in the Fox News oval; the Mail and the Express in circles towards and overlapping the lower right corner; the Telegraph and Times as analytic-complex reputable conservative; and the Mirror in basically the Huffington Post oval. The South Wales Echo would need its category : desperately trying to be clickabit but utterly failing to disguise the stupendously boring underlying nature of its stories.
ReplyDeleteThat should have been "the Indy has been dropping rapidly from being about the middle of the green oval to now somewhere in the left of the grey circle." Bloomin' mobile devices.
ReplyDeleteHuffPo and MSNBC should be in the middle of that blue circle, not at the top. There are some quality articles on HuffPo, but most of it is unreadable garbage - very much the liberal version of Fox. MSNBC pretty much the same, although I've yet to see anything I'd regard as quality. The idea that either of these two is at the same quality level as the BBC, New York Times or Washington Post is laughable.