Disentangling the Media's Biases: Center, Right and Left

In talking about "media bias" it may be helpful to discuss which part of the media we are talking about, as it is not all one thing.

Simply when generalizing among national-level news outlets from the standpoint of the familiar ideological spectrum one can speak of a "mainstream" media--that media which is most commonplace and visible and generally accepted as the baseline of discussion--of which the New York Times could be called representative. People often call it "liberal," or even "left," but it is far more accurate to call it "centrist."

Meanwhile there is a considerable media to its right, which we could identify with, for example, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Post.

There is also a body of media which can be considered genuinely "left." Much smaller and less visible than the others, and generally shut out of a mainstream conversation which ordinarily acts, in part because it prefers to act, as if it did not exist (this is implicitly what happens when people call centrists, whose philosophy is actually deeply conservative and whose positions are ever further to the right, "the left"), one might name as an example of a news site of indisputable left credentials, and which has now and then come to mainstream attention in the wake of the controversies over political-censorship-by-search-engine-algorithm and the 1619 Project the World Socialist Web Site. (If you've never heard of it, that just goes to prove the point about the left media's marginality.)

We do well to remember which of these we are talking about when we speak of the media and its "bias."