Thats an excellent question, and one that we don't take lightly. We have undertaken quite a bit of research to validate this idea by looking at the current link economy between media organizations and running our proposed algorithm on the resulting network, minus the negative link portion.

Our algorithm works by first identifying a set of powernodes (right now, about 1% of the total nodes). Each of these powernodes is then given the ability to "vote" on whether content is trustworthy or not.

Using the MIT Media labs tags I can then quantify what % of the total trust is held by the liberals and the conservatives. Currently, there amount of trust between both sides is roughly equal, though on the liberal side most of the trust tends to be in the "left-center", while on the conservative side it is mostly held by more extremist outlets such as fox news, breitbart, and the daily caller.

Interestingly, the most trusted content is often linked to by both parties, and through the classifications its very easy to identify which articles are partisan/are only being linked to by one side.

The conservative outlets don't appear to often support each other through collectively linking to bad content. Totaling up all of the conservative votes - the number one trusted source is unsurprisingly fox news, but the number 2 and number 3 sources are the Washington Post and the Times.

https://imgur.com/O05eHfX (Most trusted overall)

https://imgur.com/FCoJrWd (Most trusted conservative)

https://imgur.com/SotcwD0 (Most trusted center)

https://imgur.com/kg9dmou (Most trusted liberal)

Its interesting that even with several hyperpartisan conservative outlets given a "seat" at the voting table, these sources still bubble to the top. Compare this to the results from Facebook's recent attempt to start ranking publisher trust, using users' ratings: https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/993502674233577479