Bias of Non-Traditional Media Channels?
It is not the intention of this site to be political in nature. That said, we sometimes cannot help ourselves when presented with an interesting data set and a visual expression of that data than to dive in and see what insights can truly be gleaned. We recently watched this clip from Joe Rogan’s podcast in which he discussed an article put out by Media Matters on the right wing bias of major podcasts and YouTube channels.
The original Media Matters article can be found here.
Not surprisingly, this chart looked a little biased (pun intended) to Joe Rogan and Chris Williamson with which we agreed. But we were curious as to how biased it might be. So we engaged ChatGPT to provide some additional context we could put into a more illustrative chart. We started by asking it to rank each of these media channels based on how Progressive or Traditional they were on social views, with a “1” representing Progressive and a “100” representing Traditional views. Next we asked it to add another “1 to 100” scale for each channels views on the size and scale of government, how large it should be and how involved it should be in the lives of its citizenry. On this scale, “1” represented Anarchy while “100” represented statist views. We kept the bubble chart method to illustrate the relative size of each of these channels as measured by their number of followers. Unfortunately, not every channel from the original chart is represented here. Several of the smaller channels in the Media Matters chart were not identified by name. In addition, after plotting the full data set we had, we found that even given a smaller set, putting in all the channels made the chart difficult to read. Therefore, we filtered out any channel with under 5M followers. This was the result:
We added some additional color coding to represent the red/blue divide, but also try to capture the gradation of views from one perspective to another. These results, we believe, are a bit more nuanced and provide a more accurate picture of the media landscape. For instance, channels like Joe Rogan and Russel Brand, which were labeled as right-leaning in the Media Matters article, seem to fall dead center in the political spectrum. Also of note is that no channel occupies the statist and traditional quadrant, suggesting that the more conservative big government policies of some past administrations finds little traction online. Also encouraging, the highly progressive anarchist quadrant also remains vacant, and while individuals espousing this perspective can be found online, this data suggests that they fail to garner large followings. That said, while the Media Matters piece seems highly biased in its over categorization of centrist podcasts as right-leaning (which I suppose they may appear from the perspective of individuals whose beliefs are espoused by the upper left quadrant) our version shows clearly that the media sphere of the center and the left both do have greater traction online than the left.
Given the democratizing nature of the internet, the vast array of choices and the freedom each of us has to follow the media with we find affinity, it seems far more likely that internet based media channels are more a reflection of the distribution of perspectives amongst the population (which invariably causes certain channels to become more popular than others) rather than the internet itself having some sort of inherent bias.
That said, these were just our thoughts on an interesting data set which we believed could be more thoughtfully presented.
