Natural News (shown at the bottom left of the chart) is run by crazed conspiracy theorist and vitamin huckster Mike Adams. It is not a leftist site. Here is a current headline posted by the proprietor himself:
[quote]"The next American Civil War begins on January 20… Second Amendment patriots may be called on to defend the Republic against left-wing terrorists
Wednesday, December 14, 2016 by: Mike Adams
…Unhinged liberals revealed to the source that they are planning both an assassination attempt against Donald Trump as well as an attempted communist coup to take over the U.S. capitol."[/quote]
The person who who made the chart Mark cites in the OP is incompetent.
Any conversation about media brands without editorializing is pretty useless. Most people go find their news from other people, and not from corporate news alone. Those popular writers, pundits, radio personalities, memesters, etc. are the real money in news now and have been for a long time since people have no reason to have the factual news packaged along with it.
Yeah, yeah fake news is bad and all that - but the problem is the proliferation by others. The number of otherwise well-sourced articles that include fucking whoppers of personal opinion that are near conspiracy talk drive me nuts.
I like the graphic, it might be a little simplistic, but I agree with the placement.
What it does NOT address: the feeling that some “post-facts” people seem to have that ALL media is bogus, that none of it should be considered legitimate or believable. There seems to be a large group of people who are dead set in their belief that only their source can be trusted and that everything else is crap. It seems silly to split hairs about low liberal/conservative CNN and NPR are if they’re dismissed out of hand as untrustworthy.
At least that’s how I understand the rise of Trumpism. Maybe the chart needs another axis for “entertainment value,” which might drive viewership/readership more than “complexity vs clickbait.” It’s much easier to absorb and share stupid memes than to read news articles.
I think Addicting Info appears as sponsored links at the bottom of HuffPo articles. I confess I’m often drawn to their headlines and almost click them before realizing they’re just crap to get clicks.
Their actual treatment of the issues seems (seemed?) reasonable to me. I will say that sometimes their stories about less fortunate people seem like poverty tourism for the Whole Foods set.
Imgur.com is a picture sharing platform. It’s jokingly referred to as reddit’s filing cabinet, because it started as a way for redditors to share images. It has its own community so that description isn’t entirely accurate, but it is unmoderated. Very unmoderated. Someone made this graphic and put it on imgur, but is almost certainly a product of that one person, and there’s no telling who that person is.
This is cool—it’s almost exactly like what I’be been trying to quantify with this project I’m calling Banter (https://banter.wiki), except I call the two parameters “bent” and “depth” instead of “partisan bias” and “journalistic integrity”. Check it out if you’re interested in this sort of thing, especially the list of outlets (https://banter.wiki/outlets), and if you have a moment let me know what you think!
Initially I was gonna say that Walter was off the chart completely, playing cards with Ed Murrow, Ida Tarbell, and Upton Sinclair in the VIP section of journo-heaven.
But then I stumbled onto the egregious “Natural News” entry and now I’m thinking that this chart would feature Cronkite’s photo below CNN’s logo, with a word balloon asking, “What about ethics in games journalism?”
