A new website has been set up to measure media bias in New Zealand. The creator has described the site in communication with Kiwiblog. Both Kiwiblog and The BFD are mentioned and rated, as are left-wing blogs and all mainstream media.
The site describes its methodology:
Ingest news articles: collect articles from New Zealand media sources.
Filter news articles: automatically select articles that discuss New Zealand politics.
Entity & Sentiment Analysis: extract references to members of parliament (MPs) and political parties from article text and analyse the sentiment of each sentence.
Party Bias Calculation: party bias is measured by taking the mean bias error (MBE) between the given party and all other parties, for a particular media source.
Media Bias Calculation: for a particular media source, the mean of the absolute MBE score for each party is taken.
Coverage Calculation: the sum of all times that an MP of a particular party or the party itself are mentioned in articles published by a particular media source.
Political Leaning Calculation: MBE between all left-wing parties and all right-wing parties.
Predictably Newshub is the most biased (towards the left) of all the mainstream media. The BFD is ranked seventh and is one of only two media outlets with a right-wing bias. The other is Kiwiblog, all others are left-wing, and unashamedly so.
The BFD is actually ranked higher than Newsroom, Newshub, and 1News. Another interesting calculation is Coverage. The BFD has four times the coverage of Kiwiblog, and is only marginally behind Newsroom and a small way behind The Spinoff.
This highlights the forlorn hope and strategy of the National party in ignoring and blacklisting The BFD, and me in particular. Their biggest asset in terms of coverage was silenced by successive leaders. Instead you saw MPs like Chris Bishop engaging with and financially supporting The Spinoff and Newsroom. The Spinoff has a left-wing bias of -6.47 and Newsroom‘s is even worse at -7.09. Whoever thought it was a good way to attract votes by having Chris Bishop write a campaign diary for Newsroom or having Judith Collins sit for an interview with The Spinoff is clearly a special kind of stupid. National has now had two election cycles, 2014-2017, 2017-2020, where they have ignored, shunned and cancelled their biggest voice. They’ve also lost both of those election cycles. That doesn’t appear to be a particularly wise course of action.
The National Party were cowed by Nicky Hager and the left-wing media and since then they’ve lost twice. You don’t think the left-wing and media have stopped doing what they do in the background to shift the narrative do you?
Looking at “political leaning”, The NZ Herald is 3.84 left, The BFD 4.21 right. All others are higher either way. That makes The BFD the second least biased outlet. It is the only way you can assess that because it seems contradictory that the Politik is 5.45 biased left, but only 2.90 biased overall.
What this site proves without a shadow of doubt is that our mainstream media are slanted left in an unrecoverable way. It also shows that not only are National and Act fighting the left-wing political parties, they are also fighting the Media Party.
It was made worse by the weaponisation of the left-wing biased media, by Paula Bennett, Bill English and Simon Bridges against their own MPs. Again, not a particularly wise course of action.
It would therefore seem sensible to power up the friends of the right, and stop engaging with the left-wing media. There was a time when National Party figures wouldn’t appear on Radio NZ. That should now apply to Newshub. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to find out that Tova O’Brien has scored a new job as an SPS for some Labour minister.
Readers can do that by becoming a member of The BFD. More members mean that we can deploy more resources in the fight against media bias. It means better content and greater reach. We are already ranked seventh according to this handy measure. It should be a goal to extend our reach even further.
The left-wing media are bought and paid for. They are a lock for Labour. They were bought by the $50 million of state-funding with a promise of a further $75 million to prop them up.
We don’t believe in state-funded troughs; we prefer to be accountable to our members.
If you aren’t yet a member then please consider becoming one, and if you are a member then forward a link to this article to your friends or share it on Facebook and encourage them to join too, so that we may re-balance the media narrative.
Conservative voices are being drowned out. Let us be your megaphone against the cacophony of biased and left-wing media.