Topic: The Media Bias Chart is an attempt to rate the amount of bias in American news

[Software Santa]

The Media Bias Chart is an attempt to rate the amount of bias in the most common American news sources.

The website is called "All Generalizations are False" (which is both a generalization AND a Paradox ... ha-ha-ha: were you paying attention?).

There is another Media Bias Chart like this one, available here: Ad Fontes Media, Inc. has an interactive online Media Bias Chart!

In any event, I’m making some minor updates to the Media Bias Chart, corrections, and improvements based on feedback I’ve gotten. I’ve been fortunate to hear from many of you thoughtful observers out there, and I’m so grateful that so many of you care about the subject of ranking quality and bias.

Before I made that media chart, I wrote about other stuff too. Here’s what I originally wrote about the title of this blog.

All generalizations are false, including this one. –Mark Twain*

Really, just MOST generalizations are false. Don’t get me wrong–generalizations are often useful and necessary as a language construct–but ideas that are summed up in absolute terms (especially the ones that include the words “always,” “all,” “never,” and “none”) are usually easily disproved.

Often, much of our civic discourse is reduced into brief generalizations, analogies, platitudes, pithy statements, or–worst of all–memes.** Many ideas are short on words due to the nature of the mediums on which they are written. Social media posts and bumper stickers only hold so many words, after all. Briefly stated ideas are fine sometimes, but the danger of using them as the basis of arguments is that they often fall apart under scrutiny. Even seemingly innocuous statements like “Freedom isn’t free” and “It doesn’t matter what other people think,” though well-intentioned, are just not logically sound. Just because something sounds clever on a bumper sticker or a meme doesn’t mean the underlying idea is true. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it can also be the soul of bad arguments. Unfortunately, people try to convince each other of the truth of their opinions through generalizations, and they wonder why they seldom work. Here, I’ll do my best to take a deeper look at some briefly-worded arguments and sayings that make me sigh with exasperation, and patiently deconstruct them.

I’ll also post about other topics I get excited about. This can include a lot of things, so there won’t be just one thematic structure to all these posts. I’ll discuss politics, religion, sports, relationships, interpersonal communication, networking and public speaking, and sometimes law, because I am a lawyer and I can’t help it.

Thanks for reading and thinking.

*The internets attribute this quote to Mark Twain, which I found disappointing because I swear I thought of it on my own as well. I quote him here for the purposes of integrity, and I suppose Mark Twain’s thoughts were floating around in the ether when I stumbled upon them.

**Note: The author finds the use of memes completely appropriate for the purposes of non-argumentative humor. Like, any use of cats to make a joke on a meme is perfectly acceptable and hilarious.

http://www.allgeneralizationsarefalse.com/media-bias-chart-3-1-minor-updates-based-constructive-feedback/

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