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Our Mission

Unlike many other sites focused on news bias, our mission is not to expose the "Liberal Media" or the "Conservative Media". Our mission is to teach people "the art of reading the news."

What is the art of reading the news? The art of reading the news is being able to carefully scrutinize what you see, asking yourself where the information is coming from, why it's presented in the given format, and how this affects your perception of the actual event. It's not an art of generalizations, saying that "the media is increasingly liberal" or "such and such has a conservative bias," rather it's an art of specifics. The art of reading the news is about taking everything with a grain of salt, and asking yourself the important question of "What in this piece might be biased?"

It is our sincere hope that this site is both informative and usable. We have done our best to strike a balance between giving enough information, examples, and analysis so as to be interesting and make sense, while not going overboard and making the site impossible to go through and digest in its entirety. Should you want more information, be sure to check out our resources section, where you will find an annotated list of books on the subject, as well as links to other websites on the subject organized by the sections of this site to which they relate.

Our primary methodology was to attempt to show bias by providing people the opportunity to compare and contrast texts we provided. Furthermore, whenever possible we provided access to the full text. Our intent was to demonstrate bias in as much context as possible. In order to help people think critically about bias we raised what we hoped were thought provoking questions. We tried to provide questions that could be used for the articles under review but that also could be modified slightly and used for news bias detecting in one’s daily reading and watching of the news. Lastly, we provided reflections after the articles to provide further food for thought.

By asking questions prior to the readings, providing side by side examples, providing links to the complete articles and offering reflections we hoped not only to help the visitor to our site think seriously about the issues we raised but also provide him or her the tools to read the news more thoughtfully, critically and intelligently.