Consume Smarter: Recognizing News Media Bias with Vanessa Otero

Hello friends, welcome! Always delighted to have you and today I'm chatting with Vanessa Otero and Vanessa owns Add Fonte's Media and perhaps you're familiar with their interactive media bias chart. I have linked it in my profile on Instagram many times and they analyze media sources for both reliability and bias and this is an incredible conversation if you care about this topic. So let's say I'm Sharon McMan and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Thank you so much for coming Vanessa. My pleasure. I know that the people who listen to this podcast first of all love what you do if they're familiar with you if they're not familiar with you yet they're going to love what you do and this is a topic we talk about on Sharon Says So, especially on Instagram, truly every week and I am so excited to just hear what you have to say. Can you give us a brief introduction about your work and how you have to do the type of work that you're currently engaged in? Absolutely. I love to talk about this. My name, as you said, Vanessa Otero, I'm the founder and CEO of company called Add Fonte's Media and you may know us for our famous media bias chart and how I came to being this position and talking to you today is because in 2016 I created the original version of the media bias chart which was just something you know designed to talk to my friends and family about reliability and bias of news sources. It got really popular and then in 2018 I founded this company Add Fonte's Media to rate the news for reliability and bias in order to fight misinformation and polarization. So now I have a team of analysts to do this with me. We can get into more details about that but you know I'm really excited to be here because you know these are problems I know that are near and dear to your heart because we just see how this affects people, families, friends, so many aspects of our society. So I'm really excited to talk about this. You're absolutely right. I recently read a Yale study that took people who were avid watchers of one news channel and paid them to watch a competitor news channel for a period of time and they insured that they were actually watching the competitor news channel by giving them quizzes and the results was just recently released. The results were pretty remarkable in terms of the people who you know completed the study had a very different picture of what is happening in the world than they did before they started. Yes, that's absolutely the I mean I know the study that you're talking about and doing what we do it's not surprising to me because we have the teams of analysts who are politically balanced left, right and center and we have to watch and rate and read news articles and shows episodes from across the political spectrum, which means people are on our team are just regularly consuming content that they would normally never consume. At first, it's sort of jarring and shocking. I don't know if you've ever had the experience or heard someone say maybe you said it yourself, you walk into a room, a certain cable news channel is on that you don't like on left or right and you say oh I can't even watch that just turn it off because if this really feels bad to watch something that you disagree with and to get over that hump of like just sitting there and seeing it to understand what other people are consuming, we sort of force ourselves to do that every single day. 100% I hear that all of the time from people in my community as well where they're like I don't believe a word, blank, since pick a news outlet, wherever they align themselves politically, they believe that the news outlet that aligns with their political beliefs is the true and correct news outlet. Yes. And anything that does not align with their beliefs is feeding you lies. Yeah, and that's pretty tough, given that you've got folks on both sides all sides thinking the exact same thing. So not everyone can be right. And right now I feel like do you agree with this that right now so many people have the standard of if I agree with it, it's true. Agreement is the benchmark for truth. And if I don't agree with it, then it's a lie. Right. And that is what we refer to as a bad heuristic, the bad shortcut. The world is complicated. There's a lot of information out there. We're in this period, this information age where we have access to more information than we ever have before, which is a net benefit. It's good. But we're going through these growing pains because we don't quite know how to sort through all that information. We haven't developed all the tools necessary to sort through that information. So we rely on the shortcuts and agreement is one of those shortcuts. And there are other more important ways to measure like how likely the truth is of something. And in our own system, we have a likelihood of veracity evaluation process methodology. And our analysts, he can to account reputation, evidence, likelihood, and incentive. So that there's an acronym R E L I. And often folks will just rely on one or fewer of those. And you really have to consider all of them, especially evidence. What a weird idea, Vanessa, that you might actually want to have evidence for the claims that you're making. That's revolutionary. It sounds like this is something near and dear to your heart. That is our revolutionary notion. I know. I have a wild assertions with no evidence. Yes. Yes. Unfortunately, a lot of our news and news like landscape is that it's just assertions, just conclusions, statements of meaning, inferences, and not being able to sort those from facts statements. It's understandable why it's so difficult for folks. I mean, when we have so much information coming at us, sometimes we don't pause to like slow down and say like, what are the facts? The new pieces of information that this supposed news is delivering to me. And we don't necessarily realize that most of it in those formats is not new information, new factual information. It's just opinions and analysis. And there's nothing wrong with opinions and analysis, but we have to be able to differentiate when something is more like news and when something is more like opinion and analysis. I really want to get into your methodology about how you determine the ratings of some of a news organizations, both bias and also its factualness. I do have one other thing that I have observed recently that I wanted to run by you. Yeah, one of the things that I've noticed that some people in their news like environments have been doing, which is making wild assertions, but couching them as questions. Yes. They're like, I'm just asking questions. Is Vanessa actually an alien? It's a fair question. Right. And in reality, it's not fair question. There's no evidence that you're that you're an alien life force. And asking the question then plants the seed in the viewer's mind that there is some legitimacy to the question that is being asked when there's absolutely no evidence to back up that legitimacy. Yes. And that is a great marker, a great red flag for news like information that may not be very reliable. Because news is answers. News is not questions. And it's a logical, the journalists are, they might like start out with the question that they're asking in order to like write the article, but the article itself shouldn't be a bunch of questions. And even when the article starts, even for reputable publishers saying, you know, this raises the question that blah, blah, blah. You know, that's starting to, when you see that, it's starting to get away from the fact reporting into analysis. But the phenomenon that you observe is actually is absolutely a trope. It is a rhetorical device. It's a logical fallacy even to ask questions. It's called begging the question. And so you're making an implied claim because we see it as a question and not a statement, we will sort of dismiss it and allow it and not say, well, that's a lie because the question is not alive. But the answer, if you were to answer it in the affirmative, is a lie. It's just a sneaky way of getting folks to answer the question in the affirmative in their heads. This is a really, really common trope. And the more you see it, the more you identify it, just seeing this format can help you avoid this sort of misinformation. Our minds like to make up stories. This is a really common trope with conspiracy theories in general. What is a government not telling you? Who is behind all of this? It implies that the government is not telling you something and somebody is behind this, right? Without providing any evidence for what it is or what they're doing. So that's the opposite of news. And you know, just identifying it is a huge step towards not being susceptible to the underlying implied claims that are not true and not supportive evidence. I really like to what you just said. That news is providing answers. News is not asking questions. Right. Asking questions is not the news. Right. Anyone can ask questions. Journalists are in a position to provide answers. And that's what they should do. That's what we rely on them for. But a lot of these, a lot of people, especially on cable news, are not journalists. Nor do they pretend to be in courts of law. Right. And that's sort of tricky for folks because literally the name news is in the title of Fox News and CNN cable news network. Right. And when it's not, they don't shift over at a point in the programming and say, and now we bring to you only opinion or only entertainment. Right. There's no like delineation. And you know, there are some newspapers that do that like more traditional newspapers that have been around for a long time, like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the Washington Post. But even if you look at our printed media landscape, there's a ton of stuff out there that just analysis or a net like, you know, well argued opinion. That's not labeled as such. If you look on the right, there's a libertarian magazine called Reason. There's on the left, there's a explainer publication called Vox. And those are both and like heavily analysis. They're just not labeled news or opinion. And we have to make those judgments for ourselves. And even within a channel, a cable news channel, the morning show might be a lot of factual reporting. And the evening shows are extremely different and they're almost all opinion. So important for people to make those distinctions. Such a good point too that the programming changes throughout the day. Just like it does on if you're just watching CBS, you turn it on in the morning, they have a morning show, they have cooking, they give you the headlines. And then it moves into like soap operas and game shows. And then their evening shows, which are more like adult type sitcoms or whatever. So the programming changes throughout the day. And that is also true of cable news channels. The programming changes throughout the day. But the name of the channel remains the same. And perhaps some people believe that everything on this channel. Again, I'm not picking on any channel in particular. I'm just like making very broad sweeping generalization. Right. But a lot of people then are led to believe that everything that is on this channel is news. Right. I know people are very curious if you have not visited the Advonte's media bias chart. One of the things that you have done that it differs from what other analysis of media bias has done is it's not just how left or right leaning on news sources or a center leaning news source. It also evaluates the news sources for factfulness. What were do you use? So we use the term reliability. Reliability very appropriately. This is a point that I think is very important to make is that a news source can be biased, but also quite reliable. Yes. And people equate the word bias with lie. Right. And we have to admit that we're all biased. Like even even things don't necessarily occur to us as bias. Like we have in the United States an English language bias, a generally pro-democracy bias, a pro-America bias. Right. So those are things that exist, but we don't necessarily notice them as much if like a lot of people in our community share that bias. And you'll notice that the way the news sources are plotted on the chart if you haven't seen it, bias and reliability are highly correlated, but not perfectly correlated. We have a skews left and a skews right category. And there are news outlets that are very high in reliability in both of those categories. And there are news sources that are very low in reliability in both of those categories. So it's nothing wrong with advocating for left leaning or right leaning liberal conservative positions and policies, but how well that argument is supported by facts is a big factor in reliability. When news first breaks, it's everywhere. In the headlines on TV, all over social media, in your push notifications, it's like a storm. But the coverage leaves you feeling unsatisfied. Well, that's where we come in. I'm Megna Chakrabardi, host of OnPoint. We ask the questions that still need answers. We analyze the meaning behind the news and why it matters to your life. We equip you with the knowledge you need to face the next news storm. OnPoint is clarity when it counts. Subscribe today, wherever you get your podcasts. Life could feel overwhelming, but you don't have to go through it alone. On my podcast, From The Heart with Rachel Braythan, I share openly and vulnerably about everything life brings us and what we can learn by living with our hearts a little bit more open. Every Friday, a new episode brings you a new story with topics on self-care, motherhood, healing, and more. You are enough, just the way you are. This podcast is a reminder of that. Follow and listen to From The Heart with Rachel Braythan wherever you get your podcasts. The other thing I think a lot of people don't realize about news. I get asked this question footerally dozens and dozens of times a day. Well, why aren't you talking about ex-talk? Why are you talking? Fill in the blank. Why aren't you talking about the fact that Vanessa's alien? You know what I mean? Whatever the topic is. And I think people sometimes misunderstand what makes something news. News is by definition something new. It's new information. It's not repeating the same information from four weeks ago just to keep it in the headlines. Right. Right. Yeah. And that's something that we tease out in our reliability scale. So when folks go to our website, they'll see that we have eight categories of reliability, which those people off at first because we're used to thinking about news and like a binary like real news versus fake news or news versus opinion, but it's more nuanced than that. There is really a gradient. And so at the top, very, very, very top of our scale, like what makes a what makes a news like most reliable and most valuable really to you. It's original fact reporting is our top category. And we include in that things that are high effort investigative journalism. So things that are just difficult for us to know on our own, which rely on other journalists, like hidden information in documents or information from far away, like being on the ground reporting in Ukraine right now. That's high effort journalism. It's really important. Right. So it's bringing us new information. And that's what we put at the very apex of our chart for reliability. Now, below that, there's a category that's still very good, which is called fact reporting. And what's the difference between original fact reporting and fact reporting? Well, distribution of the factual information is also very important. News organizations will syndicate information from other journalists after verifying it. Then below that, you have still, again, good reliable sources, but they start to mix in some analysis, you know, some relevant context. But up at the top, it's who, what, when, where? And just the very, very relevant why the more you get into why and how the more it starts to be in that middle section, which is analysis, which is still, you still can be good analysis, but it's not necessarily the same as news. It's like, you know, predictions in, like I said earlier, statements of meaning and inferences and conclusions. Then below that, you've got opinion, which is less factually supported. And below that, you've got all the ways in which news can be problematic. So there's lots of gray areas of news that are just selective or incomplete or propagandistic. And below that, you have misleading information, below that, you have inaccurate information. So most of our news landscape falls somewhere in that middle, right? Between this, probably in the opinion analysis range. It's not always so cut and dry, you know, truth versus lies. And people want a short answer to it. But it's just, there's not a short answer. All right, let's talk about how do you determine where a new source falls on this? It kind of looks like a bell curve. How do you determine that? Take us through your process. So we have a team of 35 analysts that are politically balanced, center, right, and left. And we've got this team of analysts and we have them self-rate on the front end along 20 different political positions on how left and right they are. And then we have some measures on the back end as well to accurately capture how left and right folks are. But usually people are pretty good about assessing their own bias. So we train them in our content analysis methodology, which is based on looking at the actual content itself with the articles and episodes. And what we do is all day every day, we have these shifts in Zoom. You have three people to a Zoom, one left one right one center. And they have a list of articles that are going to be going through for that day because for every new source we put on there, we get a representative sample of articles or episodes before we put that on the chart. So if you go to our site and go to our interactive media bias chart and you just type in and search for New York Times, you'll see all these articles, these hundreds of articles that we've rated for the New York Times. And some are in the middle because they're minimally biased and fact reporting, they're up high. And then some are in the left-wing opinion section because they're left-wing opinion columns. And so the overall score is average that. So interesting. I'm sure you're asked this question all the time as I am. How am I supposed to stay informed? When I look at this and I'm like, well, that's depressing. Everybody is just asking questions. What would you recommend? For somebody who does not want to be stuck in an echo chamber, they don't want to just have endless confirmation bias reading only things that support their already held opinion. Recommendations you have for a normal human doesn't have eight to ten hours a day to read the news. Good question. So like we make choices about our diet, we want to make choices about our news consumption. So the sources at the top middle of the media bias chart that are most dense with facts, true facts, and less opinion. If you watch the nightly news programs on the major networks like CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, you can watch a half hour or one hour show and get like 13 stories. Or go to like AP news or Reuters, you know, those are at the top middle of the chart. And they really focus, they have journalists all over the world, thousands and thousands of journalists. If you just purposely go to their apps or to their sites, then you're controlling the way that you get the information because it's so many of us get information from either habit or algorithm. So habit is like most people usually will have five different sources of news that they go to over and over every day at most. Sometimes just one or two. Maybe it's like one website where you like the snarky takes, right? That's confirmation bias. But if it's by algorithm, it's just the things you click, you're going to get more of those. So mold your actual habits yourself and go to a highly reliable news source, limit your consumption per day. It doesn't take more than five or 10 minutes if you get a good newsletter or half an hour, if you watch one of these evening programs, to be informed and be well informed and not overwhelmed and like depressed about it, you know, the incentives are aligned to do that. Anybody can create a website that and generate some outrage and get some followers and then have that be super engaging on social media and then sell programmatic ads. That system incentivizes the creation of these types of news sources, unfortunately. And like the barrier of entry for creating something like that has gone down. And for distributing it has gone down. Whereas, you know, it's expensive to have journalists in far-flung locations. I mean, this is what's disappointing to me about the major cable news networks is they have a lot of resources. They're on TV all the time. They sell lots of ads all day long. And to increase the margins and viewership, you know, it's attractive and appealing to people to listen to opinions, they agree with all day. It's cheaper to have a pundit in studio or just by Zoom. And you kind of like six or 10 or 12 of them on one show, that's cheaper than like flying somebody to Yemen or to Ukraine. And you see the disconnect where like during this war, each of those networks, the cable news networks has people stationed over there. And they're like doing very dangerous work. Two Fox news journalists were killed and one was severely injured recently in Ukraine. Now that work that those journalists are doing is important, important work delivering that information. So to identify the difference between like an AP that's doing that all the time with their journalists all over the world or a local news station that, you know, they may only have 15 reporters, but like they're all 15, go out in the field and go get stories. That's a kind of a work in journalism that we want to value, whether it's national or international or local. And not so much the stuff that's a punditry that's cheap and easy to produce. That's one of the reasons I'm not a journalist. I don't identify as a journalist. I don't pretend to be one. And a journalist is doing original reporting on something. They are out there obtaining the information directly from wherever it is. A primary course. Yeah. They call the mayor's office. They have to get an official statement. They have to look up those documents. That is what the job of a journalist is. I don't do any of that. I will help you understand the news. I will aggregate some of the news for you so you can have a better idea of what's going on. But I'm not a journalist. I'm not out here doing original fact reporting calling the mayor's office. People underestimate how incredibly important fact-based journalism is to a democracy. That this is truly the highest importance. Yeah, it is. And you find the information that journalists try to find often is information that's difficult to obtain. It's hidden. It's holding powerful organizations to account. Everyone's got reasons for distrust of institutions. And the distrust of institutions is at an all-time high according to lots and lots of polls. Institutions include governments and businesses, even social organizations or religious organizations like churches and the media itself. Because sometimes there are bad actors within those organizations. And a journalist job is to uncover that information. It's very hard to do in our system. If we demand more of that as consumers, we'll get more of that. Right? People say like the media organizations say, "Well, that's what people want." You know, they want the opinion. They want the argument. They want the bias confirming stuff. We're just giving them what they want and it happens to be super profitable for us. But when we can realize the damage that that does to our society, I mean, I don't think people quite connect how damaging it is to have this kind of news landscape where there's so much junk in it. But if you think about how many people out there have a family member or more, more than one family member, but they don't talk to anymore because they're down a misinformation rabbit hole. I mean, that's a devastating consequence. How many people like can't get along with it won't do business with certain companies or with certain people because of how much they're polarized and how much they disagree. Look at how difficult it is for us to pass legislation about anything right now. These are real consequences. And once we realize that they're tied to our media consumption, we can demand as consumers better choices, better journalism. We have to do that with our actions. That's right. We have to stop incentivizing the producers of the junk news to disincentivize them from doing that by refusing to give them our eyeballs and our time. Corporations speak the language of money. And if they are not making money on what they're doing, then they will be forced to find a different way of doing business. Yeah. And there's another way we can vote with our wallets. Look, there are companies now that are starting to become aware of the facts that their ads support misinformation and polarizing junk news. And that's not good. It's not good for their brand. They may be trying to reach consumers, but if you notice that a company who's products you like is advertising on something that's not reputable or something that's attacking and vilifying folks on the other side, you should notice that you should hold that company to account. I mean, there have been advertiser boycotts like, hey, this coffee company is supporting this stuff that's like really way out there and really damaging to society. And people will call them out on Twitter. I think that's important. I recently gave a talk about why we should care about misinformation, why the average person should care. Because it is sometimes easier to just be like, well, they're just going to do what they're going to do. There's nothing I can do about it. But one of the reasons that I think it's important that all of us need to care is because our fellow citizens are making decisions that have real world consequences based on this information. People die. People lose their livelihoods. Democracy itself is at risk. These have very, very real societal implications when people take actions based on bad information based on junk news. Absolutely. You see it happen more and more where it spills out into real life violence. I mean, one of the earlier examples is a pizza gate. But there have been so many incidents that we forget about that fire under the radar that are directly tied to online misinformation. I mean, the biggest example being the January 6th insurrection. It's not just that it exists online. It's real life decisions. That affects how people interact with each other. The saddest part to me is when people say, how do I reach my family member who just doesn't believe anything that's real? I get asked that question all the time. It's heartbreaking to people. Yeah. It's an unanswered question, actually. I think that you've probably realized in your work and I've realized in mine, you know, we do the things we do sort of to prevent folks from falling down misinformation rabbit holes and to teach folks how to discern for themselves. But there's the preventative stuff. How do you reach somebody who's already off the deep end? And I think there aren't a lot of good answers. There's I think a lot related to addiction psychology and their programs for addiction and they're like called deprogramming kind of formats. But being addicted to misinformation, disinformation, fake news, or extreme polarizing content, I think has a lot of parallels with addiction psychology. And I think it's an unsolved problem like there's no 12-step program for like how to get out of conspiracy theories. I hope that's the next phase of work that folks in our field find tools to actually help people repair their relationships because they have similar effects to if you're an alcoholic, it affects your job. You might commit a crime, you get estranged from your family. You know, when if you hit rock bottom, those are signs that you need to do something about this addiction problem that you have. There's things that we can do to make the world a better place. And it doesn't have to be this way where social media is geared to just take advantage of those addictive things like engineer things so that it has the most engagement. It doesn't have to be that way. But we have to we have to demand it. And we can it's not just crazy people that are falling for misinformation. Well, educated, successful people can believe completely inaccurate things because the way information is presented to us right now, it's very confusing. We just need to be equipped to deal with it. And we can teach people how to do that. Well, I'd so respect the work that you're doing. I absolutely love your chart. I feel like it is such a useful tool because most of us don't have time. Just didn't analyze 16 articles from one news source for ourselves to plot where they fall on a curve. Right. Most of us don't have time for that. And so even though I completely agree with you that I love that you're equipping people with the tools that they need to be able to make these analyses for themselves. You're also providing resources to people who perhaps don't have the time to do it for themselves for all of the new sources that they come across. Tell us a little bit more about how to find your media bias chart where people might apply this? Like if I just look at it, that's great. But what about people who want to use it? Say in a classroom or in a media literacy class at a college level, can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. So our site is adfontesmedia.com, adfontesmediamedia.com adfontes is Latin for to the source because we analyze the source. And you can see that we've got our free interactive media bias chart. And that's designed for if you just need to look up a source you've never heard of before. We have nearly 2000 on there now. A podcast TV shows. You just enter it in a little search bar and it'll pop up and you can search up to five a day on that for free. But folks that want to search more new sources or dive into what we're talking about like teaching yourself how to analyze this for yourself. We have programs, we subscriptions for individuals that give unlimited access and methodology courses. And we have these designs specifically for schools. So what we find in high school, middle schools, high schools and colleges is that so many instructors and librarians find themselves needing to teach news literacy in this way, whether it's like they're doing current events and then they want to make sure that they're getting the current events from a reputable source or they're writing a paper is English paper in a first year writing class. And all of a sudden somebody's siding stuff from something in the bottom corners and the teachers like oh no, we got to take a step back and do a little information literacy librarians are especially like academic librarians are experts in this, but they don't have a lot of instruction time with all the students like not all the students are going to pass through the library, right? So we provide tools, including our interactive media buys chart, our premium and pro editions, which allow you classroom level access or school wide library wide access that's unlimited. And it comes with short methodology courses as short as like 18 minutes and then we have lesson plans and activities that go along. So no matter if you have just a little bit of time or you have a whole semester or a year to teach news literacy by analyzing news content, we have resources for schools, educators, individuals. So there's lots of descriptions of this on our site. And for your listeners, your followers, we've got a special code. It's just Sharon says 10. Sharon says 10 just all lower case 10% off of anything that you buy on our site. And that includes like we've got little mugs and stuff too. So thank you. Thanks for that. I appreciate that. Yeah. I know I have a ton of teachers in my community. You know, as a teacher, I always have a saucepot for their teachers librarians. So I know that there are a lot of educators listening to this. And the materials and resources you provide are such a massive time sabers too. You know, like librarians definitely are experts on this topic. Yeah. But how much time do you legitimately have in a day to create all of your own resources? So yeah, I mean, you know it. You know, like how limited your time is how much you have to squeeze in as a teacher. And if it's just like not squarely within what you're planning on covering, you need something that's that's easy. And you know, in a world that's like changing so fast, you need these kind of resources. So Sharon says 10. Yes. Yeah. Thanks for doing that. I appreciate that. Yeah. I want that in the show notes. All right. Well, yes. But Nessa, this has been delightful. Love our conversation. I know we could talk for a long time about this stuff. But yeah, I just love it. I love it. Thank you for your important work. I love pointing people to your resources. What you're doing is incredibly valuable. So thank you so much. Thank you. And I love that you have a fleet of govern nerds. We call our folks news nerds just because, you know, it's cool to be a nerd. I know about about this really important stuff. I'm totally grateful. Thanks for Nessa. Thank you, Sharon. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon says so podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast? Or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMan and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by her audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMan. I'll see you next time.