Identifying Media Bias
In a world with access to overwhelming amounts of media information, it’s often hard to know which sources are trustworthy. News and social media outlets can have their own agendas, using subtle and not-so-subtle methods of trying to influence their readers or viewers. Some are transparent about their biases (and all organizations have them) but in most cases it is up to the consumer to accept or reject what they hear from the media.
ConAmor Building Bridges offers you a few resources that might be helpful in assessing what type of information is being delivered. We invite you to use these tools to help inform you and the stories that you tell. If you have other fact and bias checking suggestions, please leave them in the comments below.
Interactive Media Bias Chart
Interactive chart displaying sources on left/right and more reliable/less reliable axes. Overall news source scores are generated based on scores of individual articles. Each article is rated by at least three human analysts with balanced political viewpoints: one who self-identifies as right-leaning, one as center-leaning, and one as left-leaning. Sometimes articles are rated by larger panels of analysts for various reasons. Each analyst rates each article on three individual reliability sub-factors of 1) Expression, 2) Veracity, and 3) Headline/Graphic, and then the analyst gives the article an “Overall” reliability rating. Each of these ratings are on a numerical scale between 0-64, with 0 being the least reliable and 64 being the most reliable.
Media Bias/Fact Check
You can search by media name or URL to check the bias of any source. The website ranks over 8,400 sources from “least biased” to “questionable”, which they define as:
Least biased sources. These sources have minimal bias and use very few loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using an appeal to emotion or stereotypes). The reporting is factual and usually sourced. These are the most credible media sources.
Questionable sources. A questionable source exhibits one or more of the following: extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, a complete lack of transparency and/or is fake news. Fake News is the deliberate attempt to publish hoaxes and/or disinformation for the purpose of profit or influence. Sources listed in the Questionable Category may be very untrustworthy and should be fact-checked on a per-article basis. Please note sources on this list are not considered fake news unless specifically written in the reasoning section for that source.