One of my FB friends shared one of those irritating "media bias" charts intended to group outlets by perceived left/right ideology and it's reminding me I should turn my standard rant about this into an essay or something.

These charts always end up being reductive and ridiculous for a number of reasons, including that political ideology, even in the US, is fundamentally much more complicated than that.

So you end up with the New York Times grouped with Jacobin & Breitbart with National Review.

Their underlying argument seems to be that conscious media consumerism is a matter of diverse perspectives, and thus if you read Jacobin and The Federalist's takes on a given issue, you're getting a well-rounded perspective.

Which is laughable.

I think the idea of grouping outlets by ideology is fraught, to say the least, but if you're going to do it, I think you need 3 axes to be of any use:

-Left/right
-Establishment/antiestablishment
-Quality original reporting/not actually doing journalism

But also - there's nothing in these tools that talks about reliability of information or what a reported piece versus an opinion column versus just some random's dudes ramblings with no editorial process looks like, and that's such a disservice to people seeking quality info.

Unless you live in DC, your most reliable, least spin-driven source for information about a given topic is probably going to be a local newspaper, radio station, a niche online news site or a neighborhood publication. Or some combo of those.

When I talk to students about journalism, I am often asked what I think about explicitly partisan or ideological news sites, and they're usually surprised by my answer. Which is: I care far less about your viewpoint than your journalistic principles.

Are you doing reporting or just aggregating? Are you seeking a variety of perspectives? What's your fact-checking process like? Are you writing for this community, or just about them?

And there's like, a wild variety of answers to these questions for one publication's stories.

There has been so much ink spilled on journalistic bias and whether it exists and whether it's bad and I don't need to rehash that all but I will say:

Journalists and journalism can and should have a viewpoint and values. And values are not necessarily partisan.

Government should be open and transparent and accountable to the public is a value. It's one nearly everyone in the U.S. would agree with, though people quibble over the details. It's also one even mainstream journalists have been find embracing.

Anyway, convincing the bulk of the public that most journalists are not beholden to a particular political party may be a lost cause at this point.

But we shouldn't let the fear of that stop us from talking about values, what our Overton window looks like & why we do what we do.

And if you want to be a better media consumer, find a local outlet you like or a national newsroom that does in-depth reporting about a topic you care about, follow aggregated links back to sources, think about framing & stop relying on simplified charts.