Left, Right or Center
Seems like there’s a new website, journal, emagazine or activist organization formed every day. How does one know where they reside on the Far Right to Far Left continuum?
Bias exists – period (.) We will go one step further: Every communication and human interaction is either verbally or non-verbally biased. We can’t help it. We are the product of our DNA and our experience and how we view and respond to the world is colored and informed by these two key ingredients.
One of the things we do unconsciously is make snap judgments about whether what we’re encountering in the media or in life conforms with our own biases or not. For comfort, we seek input that conforms. For critical thinking and challenge, or to engage in the battle of ideas, we look at input that conflicts. It’s hard to find “middle ground” on anything!
Sometimes it’s advantageous to have a clue, in advance, whether an information source is going to conform with our world view or not. There are lots of different scales, but for sake of simplicity we describe the spectrum with bookends at the Far Left and Far Right, a Center of course, and then with Left and Center-Left and Center-Right and Right stops in each direction.
Full Disclosure: As if you haven’t already figured it out, GrumpsReport is RIGHT!
There’s a site (of course there’s a site – there’s a site for everything) that purports to classify publications according to their bias. There’s even a cute “app” (for those of you living under a rock, an “app” is what we used to call a ‘software program’ or ‘software APPlication’) that you can install in your web browser that will automatically place a little icon (no, not a religious artifact but a small picture or image you can usually click on), in the top right corner that will label the publication as being at one of the above stops on the spectrum.
It is offered by Media Bias Fact Check and installs in seconds. It works primarily for publications, but since most organizations (e.g. the NRA) have publications, navigating to the organization’s site usually produces a result as well.
This is useful. So, for example, as we viewed the coverage of the recent Notre Dame fire, one of the sites we monitored was France24. France24 is CENTER-LEFT (you’d expect it to be… after all, it’s FRENCH!) and that helped us interpret what they were saying.
Similarly, we like to read what the Brit newspapers are saying about Brexit. The Daily Telegraph is RIGHT; The Guardian is CENTER-LEFT. That’s good to have in the back of our minds as we peruse what they’re saying.
Imprecise and biased (!) as these classifications may be, we think they’re interesting at worst and useful at best when we’re looking at information sources on the ‘Net.
We hope you will too.
