Post by Optimus on Aug 18, 2019 16:43:00 GMT -5
Given how politicized new outlets have become these days, I figured it was more fitting to put this here.
I ran across this article on Twitter and found it pretty interesting: www.epsilontheory.com/the-fiat-news-index/
It's a post on Epsilon Theory. I'm not familiar at all with this site but it appears to be mostly devoted to financial and investment stories. I can't really find any sources that claim that ET is an overly partisan source, and there doesn't seem to be too much directional bias in the article, but of course take it with a grain of salt (as one should do for pretty much everything).
Anyway, the author conducted a non-academic analysis of what they call "fiat news" buzzwords. According to the author, "fiat news" represents news stories that are written in such a way that their focus is more on presenting a narrative than presenting objective facts. That is, the stories are written in a way to tell you what you should think about the story, rather than leaving it up to you to form your own opinion.
The Fiat News Index is a way of measuring the extent to which various news media outlets use these types of weasel words in their news stories (online print stories, not televised commentary). The index is measured in "Voxes," which I find amusing, because Vox's entire bullshit shtick is that it focuses on "explanatory journalism," a somewhat Orwellian term that I consider to basically be ideological gaslighting, but whatever.
I would've thought that Breitbart and NYT would've been higher, but I think those outlets suffer from other issues and their bias is reflected in ways other than their use of the specific terms used in the analysis. For instance, I think it would be informative if such an analysis was done but also included positive and negative adjectives with a breakdown of how they're used based on the ideological bent of the media source and the target of the articles. Anyway, just thought some here might find the article and its claims interesting.
Here's the chart displaying the findings:
I ran across this article on Twitter and found it pretty interesting: www.epsilontheory.com/the-fiat-news-index/
It's a post on Epsilon Theory. I'm not familiar at all with this site but it appears to be mostly devoted to financial and investment stories. I can't really find any sources that claim that ET is an overly partisan source, and there doesn't seem to be too much directional bias in the article, but of course take it with a grain of salt (as one should do for pretty much everything).
Anyway, the author conducted a non-academic analysis of what they call "fiat news" buzzwords. According to the author, "fiat news" represents news stories that are written in such a way that their focus is more on presenting a narrative than presenting objective facts. That is, the stories are written in a way to tell you what you should think about the story, rather than leaving it up to you to form your own opinion.
The Fiat News Index is a way of measuring the extent to which various news media outlets use these types of weasel words in their news stories (online print stories, not televised commentary). The index is measured in "Voxes," which I find amusing, because Vox's entire bullshit shtick is that it focuses on "explanatory journalism," a somewhat Orwellian term that I consider to basically be ideological gaslighting, but whatever.
The poles are instructive. On the one hand, we have Vox, and on the other, Reuters. In between, there is a meaningful range. While I don’t have the data to give Reuters a completely clean bill of health, for our purposes I think it is useful to think of their level as a baseline of the innocuous usage of these terms. From there, Voxes will rise with the (1) use of these terms to explain topics in news articles and (2) the relative proportion of opinion and commentary to pure news coverage. The first is our primary focus, but the second isn’t irrelevant, and we don’t consider it a false positive. You should read this as an attempt to proxy the following question: “If I open this publication, how likely is it that I will be told how to think about world events instead of being given simple information about world events?”
I would've thought that Breitbart and NYT would've been higher, but I think those outlets suffer from other issues and their bias is reflected in ways other than their use of the specific terms used in the analysis. For instance, I think it would be informative if such an analysis was done but also included positive and negative adjectives with a breakdown of how they're used based on the ideological bent of the media source and the target of the articles. Anyway, just thought some here might find the article and its claims interesting.
Here's the chart displaying the findings: