The spread of COVID-19 in the U.S. passed an inflection point in the last 2 weeks. The number of articles published about the global pandemic went from hundreds a day to a weekday average of roughly 1,400 articles. Spending endless hours reading COVID-19 updates quickly loses its marginal utility and can drive our underlying levels …
Continue reading “The Most Credible Journalists on COVID-19”
Amid the ongoing crisis, The Factual is producing regular updates on key issues related to coronavirus, including on government actions, economic impact, healthcare preparedness, international response, and cultural consequences. Our goal is to distill the big stories down to what you need to know while also highlighting important, but less-covered perspectives on the ongoing crisis.
There are 600+ articles published every day on COVID-19, so it’s easy to be overwhelmed. Many of us are just scanning headlines to stay atop the news, and this doesn’t always translate into a representative picture of all the most important issues.
Several of the early fears about coronavirus, or COVID-19, seem to be coming to fruition as the disease continues to spread across the world. This week, Italy imposed nationwide travel restrictions, and the World Health Organization declared the virus a global pandemic. In the United States, Trump placed restrictions on travel from Europe to the …
Continue reading “Is the News You’re Reading on Coronavirus Credible?”
Misinformation about the outbreak of Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has arguably spread as fast as the disease itself. From myths like garlic’s ability to stave off the illness to the virus being a purpose-built bioweapon, information runs the gamut from harmless to endangering. At large, the wrong information can cause panic and even undermine epidemiological efforts …
Continue reading “Who Has the Most Credible News on Coronavirus?”
Before claims of a #WarrenMediaBlackout, Sanders supporters decried a Bernie Blackout, whereby the media was downplaying positive results for Sanders (a claim that also arose in 2016). This election season, any such blackout dissipated by the end of 2019 and further reversed following his strong performances in early primaries. But the question remains: is Sanders …
Continue reading “How Fair Is Media Coverage of Bernie Sanders?”
Twitter has been awash with hashtags like #WarrenMediaBlackout, #WarrenErasure, and #WhereIsWarren, the product of Warren supporters incensed with a perceived lack of coverage from major media outlets. They argue that the media has been unfairly biased in their coverage. An initial look at our data suggests they have good reason to be upset.
There are no two ways to say this: articles from outlets with a Right-leaning political orientation tend to have less credible coverage of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates. But before you conclude that this proves a liberal bias in The Factual’s credibility algorithm, it is worth looking at our data in greater detail. The story, …
Continue reading “How Credible Is Coverage of Democratic Candidates From Right-leaning Sites?”
The Iowa Caucus was a huge mess for a number of reasons, one of which may be that the credibility of news coverage of the Democratic candidates had a significant drop in the days before and during the caucus. While it’s unclear what impact this may have had on results in Iowa, it suggests that …
Continue reading “The Credibility of News Articles Plummeted Before and During the Iowa Caucus”
Many Americans get their news from places like CNN, Fox News, USA Today, or Breitbart, often exclusively from just one source. But what if many of the articles from these news outlets suffer from a significant lack of credibility? What does this mean for you and for society, particularly as we head into the 2020 …
Continue reading “How Credible Is news Coverage of the Democratic Candidates?”
