I was actually looking at this same report just the other day, and as RealityChuck notes, the graph duplicated in the Washington Post blog shows the political leanings of the consumers of news from these sources. That is, people who identified as liberal were far more likely to get news from NPR than people who identified as conservative. I’d expect that liberals would tend to gravitate towards more left-leaning sources and conservatives towards more right-leaving sources, but as the blog notes, slanted sources can attract a mixed audience if only because sometimes people are curious about what “the other side” has to say.
What I found more interesting in the Pew report was the “Trust Levels of News Sources by Ideological Group” graph. This is again a measure of the audience and not the content, but it at least gives a better idea of what sources people actually consider reliable. For instance, the “Ideological Placement of Each Source’s Audience” graph shows that liberals are more likely than conservatives to *visit *Buzzfeed, but the “Trust Levels” graph indicates that across the political spectrum Buzzfeed was considered untrustworthy.
NPR shows up as being considered more trustworthy by moderates and “mostly conservative” respondents than the Drudge Report was by moderates and “mostly liberal” respondents. On this graph NPR looks like PBS, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, and Bloomberg. The sources that look like a flipped version of the Drudge Report on this graph (trusted by liberals, distrusted by conservatives, with moderates seeing them as a mixed bag) are Mother Jones, Slate, Huffington Post, the Colbert Report (this was 2014), and the Daily Show.
As a liberal Democrat, I would say yes, NPR news does indeed have a leftish bias or slant or whatever you want to call it.
That being said, the idea that its slant or bias somehow mirrors Breitbart’s or even Fox’s is…odd.
If you want something more equivalent to Breitbart, I think USUncut has already been mentioned. Completely biased and untrustworthy, with no journalistic integrity and no interest in facts. But hey, aside from that… You could also check out something called Films for Change, which is pretty much the same when it tries offering “news,” and the little I’ve seen of RawStory would qualify too.
How about Huffington Post as a liberal mirror to Breitbart?
As for Fox, I sometimes will switch between the news stations, and I really see no difference between Fox and the other news networks concerning bias. Maybe because it’s the local affiliate?
I had my suspicions about RawStory but none of the others has any equivalence. Not even an outlet much more liberal than the outlets posted here – Democracy Now – is a Breitbart equivalent, being more of a Fox News equivalent in selectively reporting and aggressively spinning stories.
I glanced at OccupyDemocracy panels for a while before one caught my eye with something I knew was blown out of proportion. I started checking the more extreme ones and far too many came up with exactly the kind of bloody-shirt bullshit we despise from the right sites.
I guess this road was inevitable. It just had to wait for those soulless enough to run gleefully down it.
As others mentioned it, it is the intellectual part the one that is being a factor here, and that leads to other realization that was noticed by a maker of fake news:
Well, the surveys I have seen show that there were fake items that the left did swallow but still less than what the right wing did and continue to swallow; the point is a good rule of thumb, most of the ones that are educated drift toward more liberal or moderate sources mostly because by the current policies of the political parties one party is currently more in tune with ignorant forces than the other one.
In essence: a lot of moderates and liberals appreciate sources like NPR and while they might reach for Buzzfed, Raw story or other sources that are on the far left most moderates and liberals are also aware of how unreliable they are and are less willing to spam friends and relatives with their shady information.
Of course the danger here is that the Right wing in the USA is not just happy to see leftist sources not making much headway. They are also attacking moderate and intellectual sources of information because they are still a “threat” to their message. They are now officially “the enemy” according to Trump and many many Republican leaders.
Could you be confused between the cable Fox News Network and the (cable and broadcast) Fox Network (entertainment)? Fox Network has local affiliates with local news stations, and they are just local news affiliates like ABC, CBS and NBC have. Fox News Network does not have local affiliates, just the central channel on cable, and this is the one that many people think of as skewed way right.
Yeah, you’re right. I don’t have cable channels so I just have the local “broadcast” stations. I didn’t realize that Fox News has nothing to do with the Fox local network.
Breitbart is more like Huffington Post and NPR is more like Fox News. Breitbart is an opinion site that has news. NPR is a news station that slants the news to its opinions while denying up and down that it is biased. This is much more pernicious because at least with Breitbart you know you are getting opinions. Also neither Breitbart or Fox News get tens of millions of taxpayer money to peddle their biases.
Well, and NPR actually retracts things publicly when they’re factually wrong. That’s the thing that makes them something other than Fox News or Breitbart.
Hell, NPR had Gingrich as a commentator for awhile, and not as a punching bag. There’s really no comparing them to Fox, either.
Plus, NPR doesn’t have 24 hours a day to fill, so I don’t think they’ve ever stooped to enabling a commentator such as Hannity or Beck. Their shrill fact-free idiocy has no equivalent on NPR that I’m aware of.
As the Guardian’s great editor and founder of its current incarnation put it: " Comment is free, facts are sacred". It’s the house journal of the centre-left, liberals to socialists, in Britain, so its reporting as well as its comments assume some basic common values and fields of interest among its readers, but it doesn’t make things up, doesn’t usually exaggerate or over-extrapolate in its news reporting, or let comment dominate it.
Not often enough, and never for their fantasy laden commentary.
They don’t give them a forum to speakuninterrupted on their flagship news show, they’re punching bags to be yelled at.
Yep, NPR even produces game shows. Find me one commentary or entertainment show on NPR that’s half as fact-free and breathless as Beck was on Fox just about every night. Also, NPR doesn’t pretend to be all news, unlike Fox News.
Seriously, even comparing NPR to Fox News is pretty weak sauce. Forget trying to compare it to Breitbart. Heck, conservatives have been known to defend their reporting.
I really don’t see the Fox/NPR comparison, either. I rarely intentionally watch Fox. Sometimes its on the TV at the gym while I’m sweating out my weekend’s sins. But what I have seen seems to have been a non-stop “Republicans can do no wrong and Democrats can do no right” style of reporting (I can’t call it journalism). A pleasant exception to that is Shep Smith who seems to be calling a spade a spade. NPR, on the other hand, isn’t constantly ripping the new administration at every chance. I guess what I’m saying is that Fox is more opinion/editorial than reporting as compared to NPR. BTW, I’m speaking strictly of political reporting.
NPR does not correct its fantasy laden commentary either.
NPR gives 4 minutes to a conservative for a special commentary and then spends the rest of the day promoting a liberal agenda.
O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck, and Carlson were all commentary shows and never pretended to be all news.
NPR would have you believe that they are unbiased and it is just a coincidence that their board of directors are liberals, their reporters are liberals, and their listeners are liberals. I understand they have to lie about their bias to keep their tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, but I don’t understand why other people do as well.
According to this chart, NPR is just left of the dividing line between the ‘Neutral (What Journalism Should Be)’, and ‘Leans Left (Not Horrible)’ columns. Breitbart is just to the right of the dividing line between ‘Hyper-Partisan Right (To Confirm Your Beliefs)’, and ‘Garbage Right (Not Worth It)’.
Not a bad chart, and for the conservatives, they put Fox as much to the right as they put MSNBC to the left, but rate it as higher quality than MSNBC. They rate Fox as similar in quality as CNN… (though Fox a little further to the right than CNN is to the left) so I think that chart really tried to be overly fair to every side.
Thanks for the chart, but I do have questions - I’ve been looking for something similar to “The Atlantic” but right-leaning. Looking in approximately the same area, I see Forbes & “Rare.” Rare looks like clickbait. (Does anyone read it? Am I just looking at one of their off days?) And whenever I look at Forbes, it looks like a “Huffington Post” type of site where bloggers just put up think-pieces. Also, there seem to be a lot of top-10 lists.
Is there a comparable right-wing magazine/newspaper/site?
Also, that graph seems to think very highly of NBC news. Is it really that high quality?
Reason is fairly good, though its a bit farther to the right (more libertarian than conservative, FWIW). But it doesn’t have some of the long form jounalism that The Atlantic does. I don’t know of many publications left or right that do long form pieces like The Atlantic does (Maybe “Foreign Policy” which isn’t on that list at all?)
