Media bias

As a reply to my post on Thursday, Peter McAsh shared this rather messy looking chart.

It was definitely “busy” and so I took a quick look and then moved on to whatever else I was doing at the time. I left it open in another tab and got a chance to go back and look at it later.

These days, we are all deluged with messages from media and particularly from south of the border. The chart is a rather complicated organization of various news media ranging from left-learning to right-meaning and also the reliability of the sources. You can access the entire resource here.

For those interested in US news, it may confirm or put into focus for the various sources.

I zoomed in as much as I could looking for CBC or CTV or any other Canadian news sources but couldn’t find anything. Obviously, the focus here was for the US. There are lots of interesting resources included on the site, including the methodology used to categorize each of the news sources. Then, I started to click on the news sources below the chart where you can zero in on any given news media to highlight its placement.

It was there that I happened to clue in on just how the chart was created. It’s a Google Slide document and the clicks just take you to a slide to focus on the source you just clicked. Putting it together with 100 entries would be a tedious process but not beyond the abilities of anyone who has ever used Google Slides or Microsoft Powerpoint and modified a master template.

In fact, for Canadian purposes, it would be an interesting project to analyze how this was put together and then create your own with Canadian media sources. There definitely is a great opportunity for analyzing news sources and then considering their focus.