See.pessimism.com was my project to compare the bias of four different online news sites using automated natural language processing code libraries to assess the sentiments expressed in the articles.
I compared
the Washington Post,
Fox News,
the New York Times,
and the Wall Street Journal.
I found the results fascinating but my natural language processing methods are no match for the new AI LLM approaches. And even before my project, better sites were becoming available.
For anyone interested in figuring out what news organizations are more and less biased, or if you simply want to understand the bias of your information sources, I strongly recommend the sites below:
- Media Bias/Fact Check -- I love this site
- Ad Fontes Media's Media Bias Chart--an equally wonderful site. Note the general curve created by the sites. The more an organization leans to the right or left, the less factual their scores are
- Ground News -- My favorite part is their Blind Spot feature which shows what is being ignored by the Left and Right. Note, though, that for sparsely distribute news, their algorithms fail to be meaningful. For example, a Space Aliens Ate My Baby story which was only picked up by a few sites that leaned in a particular direction would trigger an unfair Blind Spot warning for the opposite side
- fun fact checks from the Media Bias site. I find this page somewhat addictive and look at these vetted news items nearly daily (which is a lot for me)