I stumbled on the graphic below today. I'm not familiar with all of the sources included. Does it seem accurate?

This will be fun.

Off the bat, I'd shift every single one of the TV news services a couple of notches down the chart.

Local news in no way or fashion is better than "not reading the news". It is a purveyor of falsehoods and various agendas subject to the whim of various lawyers or marketing schemes where the station believes it will help attract viewers. Very little of what they do deserves to be taken seriously, and a substantial amount of it does demonstrable harm.

I think there are other information sources out there that deserve to be mentioned ... foreign affairs, foreign policy magazines and the like, along with various think tanks (CFR, Baker Institute, Brookings, Hoover, etc).

For what it is, I think it's a pretty reasonable chart, though.

I would pretty much agree with the vertical scale. Horizontally, I'd move everybody left of the Economist one increment to the left, and I'd move the WSJ a bit further right. That pretty much leaves middle unoccupied, which I would say is correct.

I have a bit of a hard time with any classification that describes NPR and BBC as middle of the road. Both lean hard left. Owen Bennett-Jones is left of Hugo Chavez.

Mainly agree with Owl 69+.

I think the bias of the creator(s) of this graphic is evident in what they put in the center. It's like somebody trying to represent the cosmos and starting with the Earth at the center

I'd shift NPR to the left, too.

I'm not surprised to see CNN so low on the vertical scale. CNN used to be better, right? Before they treated tweets from random people as substantive news?

Something else that bugs me about TV news is two tendencies - one is to have one TV news personality interview another TV news personality... the other is to have a panel loaded opposing views and presume that the outcome gets you closer to the truth. I guess the latter is an outgrowth of the Sunday morning talk shows. But, can you imagine any real correlation for either of these tactics when it comes to print media?

(12-19-2016 02:43 PM)Caelligh Wrote:  I'd shift NPR to the left, too.

I'm not surprised to see CNN so low on the vertical scale. CNN used to be better, right? Before they treated tweets from random people as substantive news?

Also before Don Lemon's supposition that a black hole might have swallowed Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.

Agree with the sentiments that the WSJ should be further right and Economist further left. Washington Post and NYT should also be further left. Fox News should be as far right as Huffington Post is left.

(12-21-2016 02:59 AM)I45owl Wrote:  Something else that bugs me about TV news is two tendencies - one is to have one TV news personality interview another TV news personality... the other is to have a panel loaded opposing views and presume that the outcome gets you closer to the truth. I guess the latter is an outgrowth of the Sunday morning talk shows. But, can you imagine any real correlation for either of these tactics when it comes to print media?

I think that this touches on my biggest problem with TV news is that the channels are filled primarily with talk shows, and not News show. You don't really have a significant number of shows anymore where people just report the news or present in-depth investigations. You have a bunch of roundtable conversations that many people take as being newsworthy and factual, when in fact, it's just an hour long opinion piece (think Bill O'Reilly, Hannity, Maddow, etc.).

The "talk" shows also used to be more diverse. The Secretary of Agriculture might be on to discuss price supports.
Meet the Press used to be literally that, a moderator and two or three journalists who questioned the guest.

Chuck Todd has said the shows are becoming the political equivalent of ESPN. But as I've noted, he doesn't seem
to be doing anything about it.

And local news has been and will be "if it bleeds, it leads."

Local "news" is a cess pool of product promotion and a platform for trial lawyers to advance their own narratives. To the extent that they actually report news, you're right, if it bleeds or if it promotes irrational fear, it leads.

CBS hates this graphic

Related to this topic, here's an article on the varying coverage of the Delta Airlines / Ivanka Trump story:

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/newsro...le/2610273

The CNN headline ("JetBlue forced a man off a flight after an apparent incident involving Ivanka Trump and her husband") is particularly intriguing: they can't even bring themselves to write that there was an actual "incident", only an apparent one. What is an "apparent incident"?

Ironically the Examiner story on the coverage refers to it as an "alleged incident," which sounds to me like lawyer speak for an apparent incident. But maybe I'm missing something?

(12-26-2016 09:27 AM)Owl75 Wrote:  Ironically the Examiner story on the coverage refers to it as an "alleged incident," which sounds to me like lawyer speak for an apparent incident. But maybe I'm missing something?

Good catch - they are equally pointless phrases.