Media Bias Chart- Where Is The Quill?

You can tell a lot about a news media by its position on the media bias chart. There is one in Room 326 at our glorious former IBM building. It includes plenty of news mediums and podcasts, but it has one key flaw: it left out The Quill. The Quill is the student news site of BASIS Independent Silicon Valley, and it has certainly left its mark on the school. And so today we will analyze exactly where The Quill would be on the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart Version 12.0. 

Let’s first go over the parts of a media bias chart. Reliability is the vertical axis, which ranges from thorough fact-reporting to inaccurate and fabricated info. Ad Fontes Media, a public benefit corporation primarily known for its media bias charts, analyzes this by observing one left-leaning, one right-leaning, and one center article. The second axis is bias, which ranges from most-extreme left to most-extreme right. However, that is much easier to achieve with panels of knowledgeable analysts and a large news medium like the Associated Press (AP), neither of which I have access to. The Quill is small, and let’s face it, generally liberal. Therefore, here is my process. I will analyze every hard news article written in 2024 thus far (August 25th) and try to discern the political bias and reliability of those articles, if any. We will classify hard news, for our purposes, as any news article detailing current events without the intent of it being an op-ed. Note that this will not include everything in the “News” section of the Quill, because some depict historical events and culture.

2024: The Year of Elections (Aindra T., Staff Writer): Fact-Dense Analysis, Middle. Not much to say about this.

Children Face Inhabitable Earth (Sherry M., Staff Writer): I was expecting for this to have more analysis and opinion from the title, but it was primarily facts with a short paragraph of analysis at the end. I would classify this as Fact-Dense Analysis, though it skews a bit left due to its pro-welfare and climate change sentiments.

Russia vs Ukraine: What’s Happened So Far? (Ethan G., Staff Writer): Writer Ethan G. seems to take a pro-Ukraine stance, but that’s really all I can detect. The article seems to mainly feature a timeline. I’d put this one as Simple Fact Reporting. According to foreignpolicy.com, extreme leftists and rightists have aligned against helping Ukraine, so I would put him in “middle.”

International Interviews: Maldives (Aindra T. and Stephanie L., Staff Writers): The article is an interview about the overall situation in the Maldives. Any bias in the article would have come from the interviewee himself—as a result, it’s still fairly objective. Fact-Dense Analysis, Middle.

Mr. Trump’s Indictments (Emily R. and Christopher X.): This has a bit more analysis at the end, so I would put it as Mix of Fact Reporting and Analysis. It also skews a bit left due to its slightly negative rhetoric towards Donald Trump.

So where would that put The Quill? It has shown to be dependable, with its hard news articles mostly featuring reliable information and most articles having “Fact-Dense Analysis” status. It also seems to have centrist sentiments, though certain articles would nudge The Quill to the left. The Quill is a rather lighthearted news source, and I was surprised at the overall reliability and lack of bias of the Quill.

I’m not an educated expert. I just learned what a media bias chart was from Dr. Parson’s wall. Sue me if you disagree with any of my assessments.

Works Cited

Dutkiewicz, Jan, and Dominik Stecuła. “Why America’s Far Right and Far Left Have Aligned against Helping Ukraine.” Foreign Policy, Foreign Policy, 4 July 2022, foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/04/us-politics-ukraine-russia-far-right-left-progressive-horseshoe-theory/.