Intriguing but not yet compelling.

It is a year old but the first time I am seeing it. An effort to measure of a media organ's bias, but a measure of its desire to shape an opinion. From The Fiat News Index by Rusty Guinn.

The basic idea behind this framework is that writers, when using Causal Expressions, are communicating how you should perceive the relationships between facts and other facts, or between facts and certain conclusions and analysis. This conflation is a common way to present a judgment or opinion as objective fact. It is a writer coaching you on the logical path they wish you to follow. Sometimes that is innocuous, because sometimes the relationship between two ideas, two facts or two statements really is incontrovertible. Often it is not. When using Common Knowledge Expressions, the writer is encouraging you to think less critically about an assertion or argument. It is, after all, obvious to everyone else. Value Expressions are more straightforward and easily understood. They also look a bit more like an analysis of bias, although these words may just as easily be used to tell you how to think about what is good and what is bad without any element of structural favoring of one point of view.

I suspect you could come up with many more such expressions. The danger to adding too many is that you end up with Type 1 errors, where we catch more innocent uses. News articles include quotes from subjects that include these terms, for example. And it’s not as if every use of these words in a news article can or ought to be avoided. In addition, the preferred style of different venues will be more or less likely to lean on these expressions. For this reason, the absolute levels are much less instructive than the relative levels. For me, I understand this index to mean, “If I open the pages of this publication, how much more likely is it than in another publication that I will read a story that is telling me how to think?”

Here are the measured results.

Click to enlarge.