When verifying information you find on the Internet, one of the key considerations is to check the quality and trustworthiness of the source. You check sources for timeliness and accuracy and to ensure the author/publisher’s credibility, motivation, and impartiality. To help with understanding a source’s impartiality, here are a few open access resources available for use.
AllSides
The tagline for AllSides reads: Don’t be fooled by media bias and fake news. Unbiased news does not exist; we provide balanced news and civil discourse. For the purpose of allowing a reader to see a story written by sources with (normally) varying different political viewpoints, AllSides displays, side-by-side, news stories from the “Left, Center and Right of the political spectrum.” Below is a snapshot image (articles are included in their entirety on the site) from a news story that is covered by Fox News from the Right, The Wall Street Journal from the Center and Politico from the Left.
AllSides provides Media Bias Ratings for nearly 600 media outlets and writers. For each of the outlets rated, the reader community can provide input either by agreeing or disagreeing and the helpful feedback is displayed. Here you can read the methodology behind the ratings.
If we take the current hot topic of Trade, here we can see various news stories from the Left, Center, and Right:
Other Resources to Consider
FactCheck.org – FactCheck.org has been monitoring the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players for 15 years and is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
PolitiFact – PolitiFact started in 2007 and is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies. The Truth-O-Meter instantly indicates how truthful a statement or quote is that appears in the press. Using the topic of Trade, PolitiFact covers 1137 statements and 463 stories, with updates almost daily. Statements that are totally false get a “Pants on Fire!” designation.
AP Not Real News – Every week AP takes a look at “what didn’t happen this week.”
