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Comment by _gtly | Hacker News Reader

You might want to check out allsides.com [1] which gives a rating for where media sources lie on a left-right spectrum

1. https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings

I keep seeing allsides.com recommended here but I don't get why people find it valuable. First, it locates things like NPR and BBC news services in the "Center" (whatever that is). I had radical leftist professors that would be to the right of today's NPR. Second, the left->center<-right spectrum is becoming less and less relevant to today's media/political industrial complex. A relevant question for any media outlet re "trust", imho, is of partisanship rather than political preferences. The major media outlets are extremely partisan today and will generally not report outside of their affiliated party's talking points. The DNC/RNC control the Overton window. The distinction between outlets like NPR or Fox and Jacobin or American Conservative is on a Partisan<->Politics spectrum. The other important factor is that the Media is the cultural arm of the Professional-Managerial elite and represents that class's interests. Most on HN are also in that class and can't see past their ideological blinders.

Personally, I find the https://realclearpolitics.com model of just putting headlines from different outlets in a list to be more useful than outsourcing some sort of "bias rating" and "fact-checking" to YAMO (Yet Another Media Outlet).

Unfortunately RCP has taken to being quite partisan on it's own as well

It's not valuable. One of the things it does is chart "opinion" sources alongside "news" sources, so that the reason you see NPR in the center is that they're talking to a small (and poorly defined) subset of NPR. You see the same thing with NYT "opinion" (allegedly equivalent to Jacobin!) vs. NYT "news" (allegedly equivalently partisan to the Epoch Times!).

I think the real subtext of this chart isn't so much to portray any particular outlet further to the left or right than it is, but rather to boost the credibility of fringe outlets.

Personally prefer the Media Bias Chart from ad fontes. Has the helpful axis on who seems to intentionally leave things out. https://www.adfontesmedia.com/

That being said, I do appreciate that allsides uses an interesting method to blind bias surveys to help categorize. But sometimes things don't always line up.

... They consider The Economist leftist? Note that The Economist is extremely open about supporting neoliberal economics, being generally anti-tax and anti-regulation. The only way you'd call it left is if you ignored its voluminous discussion of finance, business, and economics and instead observe that it's generally uninterested in prosecuting any culture wars.

That’s an absurd chart. They put politico as left and cnn as far left (equivalent to Breitbart). Come on.

They distinguish between news and opinion, but CNN is definitely left. I'd call them the equal opposite to Fox.

You’re not American and don’t live in the US. You’re perspective is limited and your opinion is wrong.

It gives a rating for where the average voter on the site thinks the sources lie.

Interesting...but NPR is misplaced. It definitely is Left, to at times Far Left.

It definitely is Left, to at times Far Left.

While I agree that NPR puts out a lot content that can be described as 'lefty', NPR News feels pretty straight down the middle.

It feels pretty far left to me. It’s not as nakedly partisan. But it covers almost exclusively left issues.

How do I know the site owner’s own biases? They’re defining their own spectrum which is inherently biased.

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