"How Left-Wing is the Press?"
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From The RWEC which is reporting an analysis from The Economist, which afaik, is not a right-wing publication.
The Economist attempted such an objective measurement, using an interesting criterion:
The first step in our analysis was compiling a partisan “dictionary”. We took all speeches in Congress in 2009-22 and broke them up into two-word phrases. We then filtered this list to terms used by large shares of one party’s lawmakers, but rarely by the other’s. The result was a collection of 428 phrases that reliably distinguish Democratic and Republican speeches, such as “unborn baby” versus “reproductive care” or “illegal alien” versus “undocumented immigrant”.
Next, we collected 242,000 articles from news websites in 2016-22, and transcripts of 397,000 prime-time tv segments from 2009-22. We calculated an ideological score for each one by comparing the frequencies of terms on our list. For example, a story in which 0.1% of distinct phrases are Republican and 0.05% are Democratic has a conservative slant of 0.05 percentage points, or five per 10,000 phrases.
The result was what you would expect.
Of the 20 most-read news websites with available data, 17 use Democratic-linked terms more than Republican-linked ones. The same is true of America’s six leading news sources on tv, of which Fox is the only one where conservative language predominates.
This Democratic slant has grown over time, driven mainly by changes in once-centrist outlets. In 2017 cnn used more Republican terms than Democratic ones, while msnbc and the evening news on abc, cbs and nbc had only modestly left-leaning scores of around 1.5 phrases per 10,000. By 2022, the broadcast channels and cnn had Democratic leanings of near 2.5, and msnbc had reached 5.5, putting it twice as far from the centre as Fox.
This chart places the New York Times and Washington Post on the spectrum:
It is interesting that, by this measure at least, the Times and the Post are farther to the left than Breitbart is to the right.
This chart shows the leftward drift of selected media outlets to the left in recent years:
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From The RWEC which is reporting an analysis from The Economist, which afaik, is not a right-wing publication.
The Economist attempted such an objective measurement, using an interesting criterion:
The first step in our analysis was compiling a partisan “dictionary”. We took all speeches in Congress in 2009-22 and broke them up into two-word phrases. We then filtered this list to terms used by large shares of one party’s lawmakers, but rarely by the other’s. The result was a collection of 428 phrases that reliably distinguish Democratic and Republican speeches, such as “unborn baby” versus “reproductive care” or “illegal alien” versus “undocumented immigrant”.
Next, we collected 242,000 articles from news websites in 2016-22, and transcripts of 397,000 prime-time tv segments from 2009-22. We calculated an ideological score for each one by comparing the frequencies of terms on our list. For example, a story in which 0.1% of distinct phrases are Republican and 0.05% are Democratic has a conservative slant of 0.05 percentage points, or five per 10,000 phrases.
The result was what you would expect.
Of the 20 most-read news websites with available data, 17 use Democratic-linked terms more than Republican-linked ones. The same is true of America’s six leading news sources on tv, of which Fox is the only one where conservative language predominates.
This Democratic slant has grown over time, driven mainly by changes in once-centrist outlets. In 2017 cnn used more Republican terms than Democratic ones, while msnbc and the evening news on abc, cbs and nbc had only modestly left-leaning scores of around 1.5 phrases per 10,000. By 2022, the broadcast channels and cnn had Democratic leanings of near 2.5, and msnbc had reached 5.5, putting it twice as far from the centre as Fox.
This chart places the New York Times and Washington Post on the spectrum:
It is interesting that, by this measure at least, the Times and the Post are farther to the left than Breitbart is to the right.
This chart shows the leftward drift of selected media outlets to the left in recent years:
@George-K said in "How Left-Wing is the Press?":
The Economist, which afaik, is not a right-wing publication.
No, it's not particularly right-wing. It's fairly centrist in British terms, and the British 'center' is probably to the left of the US one, or at least it used to be. In recent years the US left seems to have gone off the deep end in terms of identity politics.
IMHO, you will get a fairer assessment of American politics and media from non-American publications. I suspect this may be true in countries other than America - i.e. foreign press are going to be less biased, although in some cases they are also going to be woefully ignorant of the countries they are reporting on, this is possibly less likely of America, since it is so visible in other countries.
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@George-K said in "How Left-Wing is the Press?":
The Economist, which afaik, is not a right-wing publication.
No, it's not particularly right-wing. It's fairly centrist in British terms, and the British 'center' is probably to the left of the US one, or at least it used to be. In recent years the US left seems to have gone off the deep end in terms of identity politics.
IMHO, you will get a fairer assessment of American politics and media from non-American publications. I suspect this may be true in countries other than America - i.e. foreign press are going to be less biased, although in some cases they are also going to be woefully ignorant of the countries they are reporting on, this is possibly less likely of America, since it is so visible in other countries.
@Doctor-Phibes said in "How Left-Wing is the Press?":
IMHO, you will get a fairer assessment of American politics and media from non-American publications
Like...The Economist
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@Doctor-Phibes said in "How Left-Wing is the Press?":
IMHO, you will get a fairer assessment of American politics and media from non-American publications
Like...The Economist
@George-K said in "How Left-Wing is the Press?":
@Doctor-Phibes said in "How Left-Wing is the Press?":
IMHO, you will get a fairer assessment of American politics and media from non-American publications
Like...The Economist
That's what I meant. I certainly wasn't referring to the Daily Mail, although that publication can also be very useful, particularly if you have an outdoor lavatory.
The Economist isn't particularly partisan, and if memory serves is printed on shiny paper, so is less absorbent than The Mail.
