Every college administrator, private school, and their English teacher has cultivated a budding romance with media bias ratings like All Sides that reveal the political leanings of your favorite and least favorite news outlets. It has turned them all into milquetoast liberals that won’t publicly recognize the genocide in Gaza.
As American politics become more polarized, an increasing focus on bursting our personal echo chambers has emerged. The effort to bridge the metaphorical gap has led to the rising use of media bias ratings to moderate personal news consumption by gathering every perspective, from the small-town Republican to the grassroots Democratic organizer.
All Sides was founded in 2012 for this purpose. Since then, it, and other tools designed in its image like Ground News, have morphed into businesses with metrics for fact checking the fact checkers and tools to help readers become an ideal consumer in the free market of ideas. In addition to ranking outlets, many raters also aggregate stories, complete with blindspot analysis and curated headlines which give you a birds eye view of what everyone has to say so you, the rational reader, can decide for yourself the real story. At least, that’s what they promise.
These sources typically use two metrics in their evaluation of news content – left/right bias and factuality. Media aggregators, often run by the same company that created the rating, use these blanket bias ratings to serve their readers a “balanced diet” of sources that try to account for both sides on every issue. The predominant critique leveled at these ratings is that they misdiagnose the bias of news outlets or incorrectly rank dissimilar organizations within the same category. That line of criticism presupposes the left/right qualifier and factuality are a sufficient metric for measuring bias.
Just as market economics falsely assumes that the consumer is a perfectly rational agent, these aggregators assume that readers are perfectly logical beings who will achieve an objective truth by virtue of reading from both Fox News and CNN. Lamentably, their focus on “left vs right”, which in practice operates as liberalism vs conservatism, obscures how ‘narrowing the range of debate’ occludes critiques of hegemonic power, promoting political agnosticism on issues of class and foreign interventionism across the aisle. As a result, media aggregators end up replicating many of the worst biases present in our media ecosystem.
Liberals are the New Left
Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and Henry Kissinger are both war criminals. The two even managed to cultivate a close friendship over their shared love for foreign intervention. As the 2016 election reminds us however, Clinton is on the left while Kissinger is on the right. This skewed spectrum is a relatively meaningless distinction in a story about Iraq where they both support the same position. Nevertheless, it is the metric media aggregators use when curating stories, leading to the false representation that the war criminal approach has wide consensus on a topic where non war-criminals disagree.
The spectrum for separating left vs right is so broad that, in practice, it cannot possibly distill the true multiplicity of political thought on each issue into unique categories. Aggregators like Ad Fontes Media employ analysts to mark what they perceive to be left or right on a variety of contemporary American political issues without a clear metric for what those distinctions mean. Other platforms define the center as being in favor of balanced corporate regulation and neutral on social issues then rank departure from these metrics.
Since many of their scales are calibrated specifically to American discourse like abortion and gun control, when evaluating foreign politics, they end up elevating the “neutral liberal” to the voice of the “left”. The relative weights of social vs economic perspective also means center right economists who occasionally support DEI in the workplace are lumped into the same broad category as transphobic socialists.
A recent example of manufactured agreement can be found in the All Sides headline roundup on FISA reauthorization. It concluded that, although a small constituent on the right had protested because FISA was used to target Trump associates, both the left, right, and center largely agreed reauthorization of the surveillance authorization bill was critical to national security.
A piece from the Washington Post editorial board advocating against a warrant requirement for digital surveillance was heralded as the voice of the left despite only having a lean-left rating. No mention was made of reporting from leftist outlets like Democracy Now! and The Nation highlighting the ‘carte blanche’ expansion of warrantless surveillance FISA reauthorization entails. This manufactures consent for these policies by framing them as widely supported and further polarizes the issue by framing critique as only present on the right.
The OPs are Already Inside the House
Large media organizations do not represent a monolith of thought. Bias raters acknowledge this when assigning ratings, suggesting that some organizations publish a range of perspectives, but this nuance in assignment is lost when aggregating the news because their metrics focus predominantly on between-org comparisons without accounting for the fissures within organizations. Media literacy requires knowledge of the reporters, columnists, and editors that constitute these organizations.
Take, for example, the Israeli invasion of the Syrian border under the pretense of preemptive defense. There are several reporters at the New York Times who have broken highly impactful stories on how the invasion, coupled with troops firing on civilians, violates international law. There are others who omit and rhetorically soften this coverage while primarily reporting the Israeli perspective.
These two reports, although they cover the same facts, lead the reader towards drastically different conclusions. A focus on the civilian death toll tells the reader the actions are unjust. A focus on defensive posture frames Israel as 'just trying it's best against unfair international restrictions'. Both of these viewpoints came from the same outlet, but in a round up only one might be surfaced. The name "New York Times" is insufficient to evaluate the bias of the source.
Complicit Omission
A quantitative analysis performed by the Intercept of reporting by major newspapers during the six weeks following October 7th showed substantial bias towards the Israeli perspective. This, according to All Sides, is bias by omission.
In the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, the words “Israeli” or “Israel” appear more than “Palestinian” or variations thereof, even as Palestinian deaths far outpaced Israeli deaths. For every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times — or a rate 16 times more per death that of Palestinians.
Despite being one of the deadliest wars ever for children and journalists, the Intercept found only two headlines out of 1,100 across all three organizations that mentioned children and only nine that mentioned journalists.
All Sides considers each of these organizations to “lean-left”, despite their reporting being consistently biased towards American geopolitical interests – a position embodied by liberals but decried by leftists. As a result, the same omissive bias was replicated in All Sides' own curation.
When Israel accused UNRWA staff of being part of Hamas, All sides reported 10% of the staff were accused of being linked to Islamic terror and that states had cut funding. It did not mention the impact of the funding cuts on Palestinians, or the reports of Palestinians condemning the Israeli report:
How The Media Covered It: Some outlets framed headlines around these details, like The Times of Israel (Center bias) and The New York Post (Lean Right bias), although coverage was most common on the Right. Reuters’ coverage initially did not include the “10% detail” but was updated late on January 29. Israeli outlet Haaretz (Lean Left bias) republished a Reuters’ wire with a subheadline framed around the detail. The New York Times (Lean Left bias), instead of updating its January 28 coverage, published a new article featuring the “10% detail” late on January 29.
Week coverage of the reporting would have included this quote from Reuters (which they cite):
The Palestinians have accused Israel of falsifying information to tarnish UNRWA
Strong coverage of the reporting would have included the extensive analysis by Al Jazeera on the impact of this story. They reported that defunding UNRWA was a form of collective punishment and outlined how Israel failed to apply international law when making the accusation.
Pesky Rhetoric
The Intercept also analyzed how and where the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times chose to use emotive words when describing the conflict.
Highly emotive terms for the killing of civilians like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” were reserved almost exclusively for Israelis who were killed by Palestinians, rather than the other way around.
Several media aggregators account for the use of “strong wording that attempts to influence an audience by appealing to emotion or stereotypes” when identifying degrees of bias. They do not account for how emotion is selectively applied or when it is left out.
Some aggregators have tried to correct for lack of coverage on topics with paid blindspot feeds, but these feeds only aggregate at the event level by comparing the amount of coverage on the “left” to the amount of coverage on the “right” for any given story. They don’t aggregate at the rhetoric level or across the same political orientation. That results in classifying passive and active voice as the same headline and rhetorical omissions never being directly analyzed.
Passive voice is used by reporters to absolve responsibility and downplay the severity of an action by referring to events in the past tense and deemphasizing the actor. This is most often deployed by police departments to reframe the impact of their violence. After the Ferguson police shot Tyrone Harris in 2015 their statement read:
The St. Louis County Police Department was involved in an officer-involved shooting after officers came under heavy gunfire.[emphasis added]
This “cop-speak” and its adaptations are regularly deployed by journalists implicitly biased towards protecting existing power structures.
When recounting the legacy of George Floyd, All Sides choose the passive stylistic pattern for their introduction saying “Saturday marked the fourth anniversary of the killing of George Floyd”, parroting the New York Post which softened “killing” to “death”. Contrasted against the Los Angeles Times which began their piece with “Four years after George Floyd was arrested and murdered by Minneapolis police”, nowhere is the headline roundup are the Minneapolis Police or Derek Chauvin mentioned. It is a small choice, but it directs the reader towards perceiving the Post piece sensationalizing violence in Minneapolis as less biased over the (still center-right) Times piece covering national backlash to police reform.
Who is This All For?
Media literacy requires more than aggregators can offer but they market themselves as the solution to balancing your media diet. All Sides suggests horizontal consumption of a variety of left and right wing sources will give you everything necessary to form an neutral fact based opinion:
A healthy media diet means consuming across the political spectrum. Especially if you are just starting out on your journey of political thought, it’s crucial to get multiple perspectives and decide for yourself what you think — not to be swayed by one or a few outlets that have an agenda.
Ground news, which probably sponsors your favorite YouTube politics commentator, suggests that a subscription to their aggregator will allow you to rise above the bias to a world where civil debate is the norm and media is accountable. This posits that there is a neutral position to take on issues like trans rights and genocide.
Some sources recommend curated feeds like 1440 that promise only facts, never opinions. These too occlude violence under the guise of “objectivity”. A search for “Gaza” and “Palestine” on their site surfaces brief explainers about the conflict from outlets like Vox and the CIA Factbook. Several of the links are now broken and only one points to a source published after October 7th, A New York Times map of the tunnels in Gaza. Their official overview of Gaza contains no more than a few links to the BBC. Their newsletters provide slightly better coverage, but no background knowledge or contextualization.
A subscription to an aggregator of diverse corporate perspectives will not give you an independent non-corporate perspective. Media literacy is hard. Bias is frequently bipartisan and more subtle than political orientation. Scholars like Noam Chomsky have forwarded propaganda models that identify upward of 5 filters. These impact every source, both left and right. Understanding how each of them affect your media diet takes time and requires critical consumption of the content of each piece you read. Knowledge that an outlet sometimes skews left on abortion when they are covering Gaza is almost as meaningless as accusing the media liaison for SJP of having a conflict of interest when reporting about mold. A subscription to All Side’s new AI won’t save you, we have to put in the work ourselves.
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