This table represents the current classifications (-1 conservative to 1 liberal) used by the Balancer extension. The classifications are drawn from work by Andy Baio, Gentzkow and Shapiro, and our own previous work. They include visit patterns (by people with self-reported political preferences), link patterns from sites with known political preferences, vote patterns on Digg, and some third-party classifications of media bias.

Sometimes this process makes mistakes, and you'll no doubt find some. This can happen when a site gets linked to by many sites from the other side — often as an example of how crazy or wrong the other side is — but not so much by idealogically similar blogs. Additionally, a site may be neutral but have an audience that leans one way or another, and thus this will be reflected in the bias score. Our automated process also yields very rough approximations; we'd urge against comparing in too much detail which site is 'more right' or 'more left' than others that have similar-ish scores.

That said, if you find errata, or major political news sites that this list misses, we welcome your feedback at balancestudy@umich.edu. Thank you!

Learn more or try the extension.