By: Kaitlin Wells, Staff Reporter
In today’s world, navigating the media, and more specifically the news, can be a great challenge. Many news sources have biased or inaccurate content which can confuse and mislead many people. Fortunately, Vanessa Otero has provided a solution for all of us with the creation of her media bias chart.
Vanessa Otero is a patent attorney from Colorado, and the creator of the ad fontes media company. Although Otero is not a journalist, she has had analytical reading and writing training that she not only uses in her job, but in the production and updating of the media bias chart as well. The media landscape today has adapted over many years with the increase of technology in our society. This new landscape creates a new field of analyzing this landscape. “I am not doing journalism, I am doing an analysis of journalism,” says Otero. By using an analysis of journalism and using specific methodology, the media bias chart was made.
In order to rank each news source in the chart, there are certain steps which Otero uses. Individual stories are rated on a political scale from most extreme left to most extreme right. Each individual sentence in an article is then rated on veracity or truthfulness, expression, and fairness. Using these methods, each source is given a weighted average of individual stories, and those raw scores are them charted as coordinates using algorithms.
Many people have not only found the media bias chart useful but many agree with the rankings of the sources shown on the chart. Currently, Otero is the only person behind the ratings of news sources, but wishes to expand her project in the future. This includes having more analysists as well as having an interactive chart that will rank each individual story of a news source.
The media bias chart is not only an important resource now but will continue to be in the future. It will help inform people of the truthfulness of what they are reading and will help in understanding the ever-changing media landscape. As members of society, it is important for us to be able to find news that is true and not misleading. Sources like the media bias chart will help us to be a society of facts rather than fake news.