Vanessa’s blog, All Generalizations are False – Home of the Media Bias Chart: Part 2 of 4: Why Measuring Political Bias is So Hard, and How We Can Do It Anyway: The Media Bias Chart Horizontal Axis

“How to Define Political Bias in a Meaningful, Useful Way – In part one of this series I laid out some problems with existing ways of measuring bias and outlined a proposed new methodology for rating such bias in news sources within a defined taxonomy (the horizontal axis of the Media Bias Chart). In this post, I’ll first define what the terms “partisanship” and “political bias” in this taxonomy (“partisanship” and “political bias” are used somewhat interchangeably here, though they are distinguishable in some aspects). More specifically, I’ll define what the concepts of “liberal,” neutral/center,” and “conservative” mean within the scope of this chart, and the reasoning behind these definitions. Then, I’ll discuss what the horizontal categories on the chart represent. For clarity, let’s go one step further back and specify that what “political/partisan” bias even means. Here, I refer to the preference for policy positions that are available for individual people to have on particular topics that are subject to legislation by government. I am not referring to individual people themselves as left- or right-biased. In other words, the definitions are topic-focused, not people-focused. For example, I will define policy positions, such as “taxes should be higher/the same/lower on wealthy people” as liberal/centrist/conservative, rather than define individual people, like journalists or politicians, as themselves being liberal/centrist/conservative. Regarding the answer to the questions of what “liberal,” “centrist,” and “conservative” (hereinafter referred to as simply “liberal/conservative” or “left/right”) policy positions are, this is difficult to answer because 1) what is considered liberal or conservative is a moving target over time, 2) there isn’t necessarily a “center” on each topic, and 3) some people will always disagree on the definitions I or anyone else may come up with….”