Do you watch news on TV? Think about the number of news stations you watch. Now think of the number of sites you read news from. Unless you absolutely refuse to read from any other site, you probably read from more news sites than you watch. This is definitely the case for me. In fact, you probably also read a variety of news websites, even if you check in on certain sites only to confirm a certain point of view.
Enter Slate’s interactive test of news open-mindedness. The test uses your browsing history of certain websites that contain news to determine how open-minded you are based on the news sites you visit. There are problems with this method, namely that the method has no idea what you think of the sites you visit or how long you stayed. Nevertheless, here are my results:
Sites Visited:
Reddit (23% conservative)
CBC (Radio Canada) (46% conservative)
Salon (34% conservative)
The White House (58% conservative)
Chicago Tribune (44% conservative)
The Huffington Post (30% conservative)
Fox News (88% conservative)
CNN (54% conservative)
MSNBC (57% conservative)
At these sites, the readership is on average 48 percent conservative, 52 percent liberal
Your isolation index is -33, meaning that, on the bell curve of all readers, your news diet is 33 percentage points to the left.
I’ve visited many more news sites than these recently, so this must be a sampling. If this list and the readership are reliable, then my collection of news sites are politically balanced, which is never bad. Now to stay that way.
Oh, and that site Slate mentioned that guesses your gender based on browser history? It gave me a 6% likelihood of being female. These are tears of laughter, really.