News coverage of Cruz and Cuomo shows significant media bias

By Kent R. Kroeger (February 26, 2021)

This Media Bias Chart places news sources in a two-dimensional taxonomy of reliability and political bias. This is the 4.0 version, created in 2018 by Ad Fontes Media founder Vanessa Otero. It was created in 2018.

It is reasonable to think some news stories should be considered more important than others. And though one person might have a different ranking than another person, when those subjective rankings are combined across an entire society, the average ranking should reflect the relative importance of news stories within that society.

In reality, however, editors and journalists through their training and position possess disproportionate power in developing those rankings and, subsequently, are the ones who decide what news stories are ‘fit to print’ and make the nightly TV news. Nonetheless, if news organizations — which are mostly for-profit enterprises in the U.S. — want to be economically viable, a common assumption is that they will publish and broadcast the stories most important to the news-consuming public.

The above news-production model, of course, is a middle school civics class load of crap.

American news organizations long ago learned that it is more profitable to create compelling (i.e., commercially attractive) news narratives and to wedge daily events, when possible, into those narratives, not because news organizations aim to deceive the news-consuming public, but because they aim to make money. And, as we’ve all…