Who is the Least Biased News Source? Simplifying the News Bias Chart

 

“I challenge anybody to show me an example of bias in Fox News Channel.”

Challenge accepted.

Rupert Murdoch, the founder and current chairman of Fox Corp (owner of Fox News) first said the above quote in an article on the Salon website in 2001.

And even though it’s from almost 20 years ago, I can’t think of a more telling quote about the current environment of news in America.

Was there actually any iota of truth to that statement?

“Fake news!”

“Mainstream media!”

“Hoax!”

All of these phrases seem to be shouted from the rooftops everywhere we look these days.

On TV, on the internet, social media — even in private conversations with family and friends.

This has weighed on me (and probably you too) for a while now.

Not only have normally friendly conversations turned vitriolic, but it seems a candid discussion about actual facts is getting more and more impossible every day.

My curiosity finally got the best of me and I spent a huge amount of time over the last couple of weeks collecting and analyzing related data.

I explored the subject of what truly can be considered fake news today.

• Which sites are actually biased?
• Which news sources consistently provide more fiction than facts?
• How impactful are the relationships between reliability, bias, and traffic?

I explore these questions and many more in the following analysis.

Enjoy!

Table of contents

1. Methods and sources
2. Legend
3. Interesting data
4. Which websites can be considered ‘Fake News’?
5. Which news sources should we be reading?
6. Who are the 10 most biased news sources?
7. Who are the 10 most neutral news sources?
8. Who are the 10 most liberally biased news sources?
9. Who are the 10 most conservatively biased news sources?
10. What news websites get the most traffic in the USA?
11. Which sites can be considered contributors to echo-chambers?
12. How many news sources use paywalls?
13. Graphical data and correlations
14. Website visits vs News media bias
15. Reliability vs Unique American visitors in July
16. Bias vs Reliability
17. Monthly visits per person vs Reliability
18. Commentary
19. Full list of news websites analyzed

Be extremely skeptical when reading these news sources:

1. 🔴World Truth TV — 11.6%
2. 🟢National Enquirer — 15.1%
3. 🔴The Gateway Pundit — 19.4%
4. 🔴InfoWars — 20.3%
5. 🔴NewsPunch — 22.5%
6. 🔵Wonkette — 23.9%
7. 🔴WorldNetDaily — 26.5%
8. 🔴Twitchy — 26.7%
9. 🔵Palmer Report — 27.6%
10. 🔴PJ Media — 28.7%
11. 🔵Bipartisan Report — 30.1%
12. 🔵Occupy Democrats — 31.3%
13. 🔴Breitbart — 32.2%
14. 🔵Alternet — 33.4%
15. 🔴Conservative Review — 34.1%
16. 🔴The American Spectator — 34.4%
17. 🔴The Federalist — 34.7%
18. 🔵ShareBlue — 35.5%
19. 🔵Crooks and Liars — 36%
20. 🔴American Thinker — 36.1%
21. 🔵Daily Kos — 36.2%
22. 🔴Daily Caller — 37.4%

The following 15 news sources ranked the highest under this metric.

1. 🟢AP, 79.2%
2. 🟢Reuters, 78.9%
3. 🟢Weather.com, 75.9%
4. 🟢ABC News, 73.9%
5. 🟢The Advocate, 73.9%
6. 🟢Bloomberg, 72.9%
7. 🟢National Public Radio, 72.9%
8. 🟢Wall Street Journal, 72.1%
9. 🟢The Hill, 72.1%
10. 🟢Financial Times, 71.9%
11. 🟢LA Times, 70.8%
12. 🟢PBS, 70.6%
13. 🟢Al Jazeera, 70.5%
14. 🟢CBS, 70.3%
15. 🟢Fortune, 69.8%

Avoid these sources if you value neutrality:

1. 🔵Wonkette, -31.15
2. 🔴InfoWars, 31.05
3. 🔴American Thinker, 29.82
4. 🔵Palmer Report, -29.37
5. 🔴NewsPunch, 28.58
6. 🔴The Gateway Pundit, 28.55
7. 🔵Occupy Democrats, -25.59
8. 🔴Conservative Review, 25.3
9. 🔵ShareBlue, -24.95
10. 🔴Life News, 24.75

News media to consider the most neutral sources:

1. 🟢The Hill, 0.09
2. 🟢Forbes, 0.2
3. 🟢Christian Science Monitor, -0.21
4. 🟢Business Insider, -0.38
5. 🟢Fortune, 0.43
6. 🟢Marketwatch, -0.54
7. 🟢Financial Times, 0.62
8. 🟢Bloomberg, -0.85
9. 🟢Reuters, -0.95
10. 🟢AP, -1.06

Based on the data and in my opinion, the following websites are harming the news industry and our political discourse.

1. 🔵Palmer Report — 27.6% reliability score, 8.2 average monthly visits
2. 🔵Crooks and Liars — 36%, 6.2
3. 🔵Daily Kos — 36.2%, 5.3
4. 🔴Breitbart — 32.2%, 5.3
5. 🔴Twitchy — 26.7%, 5.1
6. 🔴Fox News — 41.8%, 4.9
7. 🔴The Gateway Pundit — 19.4%, 4.8
8. 🔴PJ Media — 28.7%, 4.4
9. 🔴InfoWars — 20.3%, 4.3
10. 🔵FreeSpeech TV — 38.7%, 4.0
11. 🔴RedState — 41.3%, 3.7
12. 🔵Wonkette — 23.9%, 3.6
13. 🔴American Thinker — 36.1%, 3.6
14. 🔵Alternet — 33.4%, 3.2
15. 🔴Daily Caller — 37.4, 3.1
16. 🔴Daily Wire — 38.1%, 3.0

Far more details for inquiring minds:

https://towardsdatascience.com/how-statistically-biased-is-our-news-f28f0fab3cb3

This does not bring us together.

It leads to us doubting our neighbors, our friends, our parents, and other important people in our lives.

Eternal distrust.

You can’t believe what you hear.

Every man for himself.

It seems that many people these days, mistakenly in my opinion, search for sources based on what they already want to hear.

They look for articles to confirm their suspicions. Their thoughts and feelings.

Right or left, it doesn’t matter. If you search on Google for something to back up your feeling on a subject (regardless of truth) — you will find it.

There’s an article for everything now.

Opinions being added to the news cycle has corrupted the impartiality of it.

This is not how we come together as a world, as a nation.

We must be better than this.

It’s my belief that many of these websites, their owners, and their anchors are one of the largest absolute causes of anger in the world today.

Be better, people.

J.J. Pryor  Sep 9·19 

How A Pro-Trump Militia Sees The Election

Where's Waldo (Antifa, BLM, evil democrats, the militia, 

the partisan media, etc.)

Part of a broadcast yesterday of an episode of This American Life, Squeaker, was based on a reporter embedded in a heavily armed Virginia militia group. The militia was prepared to fight Antifa and BLM to defend the election. NPR broadcast the program yesterday. The broadcast is here and this ~21 minute segment is called Act 1, Virginia.

Summary: The militia members anticipated election interference and fraud. They wanted to engage to stop interference in the election. They believed that would happen because Trump said so. The group went to various polling places and found no evidence of any interference with voting. There were lots of nice, polite people, but no Antifa, BLM or whatever else there might be trying to disrupt the voting, intimidate voters or commit fraud.

After the election was over, the group still believed that democrats were committing fraud in the ballot counting because Trump said so. No evidence was cited, just allegation of fraud. When asked if Trump conceded and said that Biden won the election, the militia (or at least the member interviewed) said he would absolutely not believe that Trump could lose by any means other than fraud. There is no way those folks could ever believe the 2020 election was free and fair.

That is more evidence of just how powerful Trump's blatant lies are with some people, even when they are faced with contrary evidence they themselves experienced directly. These minds cannot ever accept actual truth for whatever reasons, e.g., tribe loyalty, intense fear and/or hate of democrats, deep distrust in the media and/or democrats, etc.  

An Early Skirmish With America's Christian Nationalist Supreme Court

The Satanic Temple logo

A press release from The Satanic Temple (TST) states that the TST has lost its Supreme Court motion to disqualify Justice Amy Coney Barrett, alleging it is reasonable to believe that she cannot impartially consider a case involving abortion. The press release comments:

TST's complaint was initially filed when TST member Judy Doe, seeking an abortion in Missouri, was forced to accept literature that asserted the position that life begins at conception and then was made to endured a three-day waiting period that was designed to instill guilt and shame for her decision. TST argued that the imposition of this arbitrary view on when life begins violates their religious beliefs of science and bodily autonomy and creates an unconstitutional undue burden on Doe's religious practices. The Eighth Circuit Court dismissed the case and held that Missouri's proclamations do not violate Doe's free exercise of religion, even though they are rooted in Catholic dogma. TST appealed this decision to the Supreme Court.

In its motion to disqualify, TST stated that "any objective observer would reasonably believe it is unlikely Justice Barrett could set aside her deeply-held religious beliefs on the illegitimacy of abortion and barbarity of [Roe v. Wade] to render an impartial decision on the Petition." TST spokesperson and cofounder Lucien Greaves states, "We cited numerous examples in our motion that unequivocally display Justice Barrett's hostility towards the act of terminating a pregnancy. Yet, the Supreme Court refused to recognize that her dogmatic conclusions related to abortion, which she announced publicly, can reasonably affect her ability to impartially rule on our religious freedom claims."

Greaves continues, "Federal law states that judges must disqualify themselves in any proceeding in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. Because the Supreme Court has essentially removed any basis for asserting bias, they invite questions about the legitimacy of the legal system as a whole. When the Supreme Court considers if they will hear our abortion case in conference on November 20, we hope for the sake of upholding fair and impartial jurisprudence that they will make decisions justified by established legal precedence."

Barrett has made her bitter opposition to abortion perfectly clear. Her impartiality can reasonably be questioned. She is clearly biased and should recuse herself. But under our Christian Nationalist Supreme Court, concerns like this will routinely be swept away. A major point of the Evangelical radical right putting her on the court was to get rid of Roe v. Wade once and for all.

TST religion is not a religion

The other, equally or more concerning aspect of this is the decision Eighth Circuit Court that dismissed Doe's case and held that Missouri's law did not violate Doe's free exercise of her religion. Doe is a member of TST, which is an officially recognized religion under US law. She adheres to the TST religion. In essence, the Eighth Circuit did not recognize the TST as an official religion, at least implying that the Missouri law could not be a burden on her religious exercise. 

TST religious dogma on abortion is clear. TST abortion tenets hold that women have bodily autonomy and members should act in accordance with scientific evidence. TST describes its religious abortion ritual like this:

The Satanic Temple has announced that its Satanic abortion ritual exempts TST members from enduring medically unnecessary and unscientific regulations when seeking to terminate their pregnancy. The ritual involves the recitation of two of our tenets and a personal affirmation that is ceremoniously intertwined with the abortion. Because prerequisite procedures such as waiting periods, mandatory viewing of sonograms, and compulsory counseling contravene Satanists’ religious convictions, those who perform the religious abortion ritual are exempt from these requirements and can receive first-trimester abortions on demand in states that have enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

First, the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause as well as several state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRA), protects religious practices and beliefs from government interference. Second, state laws governing abortions commonly serve no medical purpose and do not result in better health outcomes. Therefore, they unlawfully hinder access to the Satanic abortion ritual.

White Christian Nationalist Ideology

Both the Eighth Circuit court decision and the Supreme Court decision are in accord with the tenets of Christian Nationalism, a religiously chauvinistic ideology that takes a hostile view of other religions and a place for them in American society. The group Christians Against Christian Nationalism describes it like this:

Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation.

As Christians, we are bound to Christ, not by citizenship, but by faith. We believe that:

People of all faiths and none have the right and responsibility to engage constructively in the public square.

Patriotism does not require us to minimize our religious convictions.

Government should not prefer one religion over another or religion over nonreligion.

America’s historic commitment to religious pluralism enables faith communities to live in civic harmony with one another without sacrificing our theological convictions.

This kind of intolerant, radical white Christian theocracy is the new normal that we can probably often or always expect to come from the federal courts for the next 20-30 years. That is what happens when the GOP turns authoritarian and intolerant of democratic norms.

Tracking Viral Misinformation About the 2020 Election

 Every day, Times reporters will chronicle and debunk false and misleading information that is going viral online.

Republican distrust of news may be helping election misinformation spread.

Research from Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has found a long and steady decline in trust in traditional media among more conservative Americans. In its place, they are increasingly relying on right-wing media outlets like Breitbart News and One America News and conservative pundits with a history of spreading falsehoods.

This week, Politico published a poll finding that 70 percent of Republicans do not believe the election was free and fair.

OTHER HEADLINES:

No, Dominion voting machines did not delete Trump votes.

Conservatives, feeling muzzled on social media, are switching to apps like Parler.

We called officials in every state. None had evidence of significant voter fraud.

There is no proof that people stole maiden names to vote.

For those who still believe in Rightwing Conspiracy theories concerning the election, please read:

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/2020-election-misinformation-distortions