Grounding AllSides.com

This article will seek to clarify information presented at <a href="http://www.allsides.com/about-bias">www.allsides.com on media bias.

All Sides is a great web resource which can be quickly used to check bias on a wide spectrum of media sources. It's rating system is basically a scale from 1-5 where 1 is far left and 5 is far right in terms of bias favoring one side or the other of American politics.

Independent of the site, I did some research on Washington Post. I get the Post and the Times mixed up and I can't remember which is the slightly left one so ya. Anyway.

I was reminded that Amazon.com magnate <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeff_Bezos&oldid=603050629#The_Washington_Post">Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. Bezos is from New Mexico, having stopped through Florida and Princeton as he grew eventually into his role at Amazon. Consistent with that developmental cycle he is a mild leftist with a respect for business. He has been characterized as a libertarian, but he has donated <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jeff_Bezos&oldid=603050629#Early_life_and_personal">$8 to U.S. Democrats for each dollar he has donated to Republicans.

The fact that Bezos has been characterized as a libertarian and the fact that he has donated to both Democrats and Republicans is consistent with the idea that the Washington Post leans slightly left. This is consistent with the rating from All Sides, which is a 2/5, or slightly left.

More than providing consistency with All Sides, we also now have a quantitative, financial grounding, albeit a rough one, for what characterizes a slight leftist.

We can also come up with very rough ranges by making various assumptions (this is by no means a full set of models or even good ones):

These numbers are ratios of $donated Dem/Rep:

Score / Ideology                  Linear                 Squared                Purist

1/Far Left                                X>=16                     X>=64             infinite

2/Slight Left                         16<X<1                   64<X<1                X>1

3/Centrist                                      1                                  1                         1

4/Slight Right                     1/16>X>0             1/64>X>0           1>X>0

5/ Far Right                            X>=1/16                X>=1/64                0