02/10/2022

Judge the Quality of a News Outlet by Examining Its Audience's Political Diversity

An ideologically diverse audience should be considered

One exercise I like to use when teaching college students about media is to draw a Cartesian coordinate plane, give them each a list of news organizations, and then have them place each one at some X,Y coordinate. You know the kind of graphing-paper chart I mean — like New York magazine’s Approval Matrix, only with National Review and the AP instead of West Elm Caleb and Neil Young.

I tell them the Y-axis represents a publisher’s journalistic quality — a +10 up at the top is the platonic ideal of amazing reporting, a -10 at the bottom is “The Pope Endorsed Donald Trump.”

The X-axis represents the publisher’s political positioning; from left to right, you might have Jacobin at -9, The New Republic at -6, The New Yorker at -4, the AP at 0, The Dispatch at +4, Fox News at +8, and Newsmax at +10.

Please select this link to read the complete article from NiemanLab.