In Search of the Truth
In this extremely political and polarized world, when we
read a newspaper or magazine or watch a news report on TV or on cable TV, those
of us who are concerned with the actual truth, rather than a biased version of
the truth, really need to know the filter through which we are receiving the
content. It does not take a media expert
professional to quickly determine that the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN
and MSNBC, are consistently biased toward the left side of politics. Similarly, it is readily evident that the Wall
Street Journal, National Review and Fox News is slanted to the right side of
politics. Quick surveys of the headlines
and chyrons from these sources reaffirms these conclusions
But what about the Associated Press, Reuters, and the myriad
other news sources out there? What is
their bias, if any? What about Google as
an online search engine, and Wikipedia as a reference source? Can we straight-away believe content from
these sources?
After years of searching and use, I have found that the
media bias fact checking web site is an excellent source for determining the
bias of nearly all of the media news sources.
The service has been available since 2015, and has improved with time. I use this service particularly, when I find
an obscure news source that I have not seen before, and have found them to be
very accurate in their appraisals of media sources.
Opening the “Methodology” link provides a lot of information
on how they rate media outlets. A search
function is provided to look up a specific media outlet, and links are provided
for lists of various gradations of media bias.
Turning to online methods, Google searches have been shown
to slant the searcher toward left oriented topics, and Wikipedia is similarly
slanted left. An alternate, unbiased
search engine with a strange name is “Duckduckgo”, which also does not track
your searches. An alternative to
Wikipedia is “Infogalactica”. An
alternative to the Chrome or Edge web browsers is “Bravo”. Personally, I have found these latter to
somewhat pedestrian compared to the more popular, (but left slanted) ones. If I am really researching something like the
truth behind the Russia collusion investigation, I can find very little that is
honest in the conventional biased coverage.
In that case, I’ll use Bravo as a web browser, Duckduckgo as a search
engine, and Infogalactica as a reference source. I have tried this. You would be amazed at the difference that
the lack of a leftish bias makes.
Ray Gruszecki
May 16, 2020
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