Is plagiarism still in
style? Every now and then, something
just needs copying. The web site allgeneralizationsarefalse.com
recently published its 2017 Media Bias Chart.
It’s full of generalizations and bias.
The premise is simple: create a chart that rates news organizations on quality of
content (from garbage, to fair, to factual) and political persuasion (from ultra
liberal to mainstream to ultra conservative).
How hard could that be?
I know people who think Fox News
is fair and balanced, and some who look to MSNBC for the truth. Watching either in the last two weeks could
easily drive you to CNN. Newspapers are
dropping like flies as ad dollars move to the web. Young people don’t read newspapers
anymore. They get their news from
Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. Really?
The point is that millions upon
millions of people get their news from web sites. Each site has its bias and its demonstrated
value for the truth. I like my news
straight up: Who, What, Where, When. I
want opinion on the op-ed page. I like
both well written. You can find that
kind of reporting at (here comes a bias) the New York Times, Politico, npr,
PBS, The Hill, Time and BBC among others.
To be fair, those with reasonable
opinions and interpretation of the news also include the New Yorker, Vanity
Fair, Mother Jones, Buzz Feed, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and the
Daily Mail. (You should be editing by
now.)
The Drudge Report, Federalist,
and Huffington Post tend to cluster with the cable news channels at the lower
end of the scales.
The really biased and fabricators
of information and junk reporting include Red State, Breitbart, Forward Progressives,
US Uncut, and Infoward.
I admit to a demented need to
know what is going on in the world. I
read several news sites before breakfast because the morning newspaper went to
press at ten o’clock the night before and a lot of tweeting can occur during
sleep time.
On the oft chance that not
everyone is a news hound and only read or watch two or three news sources each
day, it’s helpful to consider their quality and bias. Go to 2017MediaBiasChart.com to see how
news sources can be arrayed. I’ve
already deleted a couple of sites from my bookmark list and added new ones that
are supposedly less biased and ranked higher for quality of reporting.
What do you think?
