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RiverDance posted:
People that watch the news daily including a mix of liberal
and conservative outlets that have a grain of sense are very
capable to reference for their own satisfaction.
 
The CNN type will never admit to anything they don't want to
be true or said it a way for their approval.

Said by a person who believes Fox News is the people's gift of knowledge or who uses 'breitbart' for a source. ha!

Last edited by Br’er Rabbit

According the the originator of the chart, here a synopsis of her analytic method.

"...the most accurate and helpful way to analyze a news source is to analyze its individual stories, and the most accurate way to analyze an individual story is to analyze its individual sentences. I recently started a blog series where I rank individual stories on this chart and provide a written analysis that scores the article itself on a sentence-by-sentence basis, and separately scores the title, graphics, lede, and other visual elements. See a couple of examples here. Categorizing and ranking the news is hard to do because there are so very many factors. But I’m convinced that the most accurate way to analyze and categorize news is to look as closely at it as possible, and measure everything about it that is measurable. I think we can improve our media landscape by doing this and coming up with novel and accurate ways to rank and score the news, and then teaching others how to do the same. If you like how I analyze articles in my blog series, and have a request for a particular article, let me know in the comments. I’m interested in talking about individual articles, and what makes them good and bad, with you.

As I’ve been analyzing articles on an element-by element, sentence-by-sentence basis, it became apparent to me that individual elements and sentences can be ranked or categorized in several ways, and that my chart needed some revisions for accuracy.

So far I have settled on at least three different dimensions, or metric, upon which an individual sentence can be ranked. These are 1) the Veracity metric, 2) the Expression metric, and 3) the Fairness metric

The primary way statements are currently evaluated in the news are on the basis of truthfulness, which is arguably the most important ranking metric. Several existing fact-checking sites, such as Politifact and Washington Post Fact Checker, use a scale to rate the veracity of statements; Politifact has six levels and Washington Post Fact Checker has four, reflecting that many statements are not entirely either true or false. I score each sentence on a similar “Veracity” metric, as follows:

  • True and Complete
  • Mostly True/ True but Incomplete
  • Mixed True and False
  • Mostly False or Misleading
  • False

Since there are many reputable organizations that do this type of fact-checking work, according to well-established industry standards, (see, e.g., Poynter International Fact Checking Network), I do not replicate this work myself but rather rely on these sources for fact checking.

It is valid and important to rate articles and statements for truthfulness. But it is apparent  that sentences can vary in quality in other ways. One way, which I discussed in my previous post (The Chart, Second Edition: What makes a News Source ‘Good’) is on what I call an “Expression” scale of fact-to-opinion. The Expression scale I use goes like this:

  • (Presented as) Fact
  • (Presented as) Fact/Analysis (or persuasively-worded fact)
  • (Presented as) Analysis (well-supported by fact, reasonable)
  • (Presented as) Analysis/Opinion (somewhat supported by fact)
  • (Presented as) Opinion (unsupported by facts or by highly disputed facts)

In ranking stories and sentences, I believe it is important to distinguish between fact, analysis, and opinion, and to value fact-reporting as more essential to news than either analysis or opinion. Opinion isn’t necessarily bad, but it’s important to distinguish that it is not news, which is why I rank it lower on the chart than analysis or fact reporting."

http://www.allgeneralizationsarefalse.com/

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