There is a New Zealand website that measures media bias. I thought it would be interesting to see how The BFD compares to other media, so I visited it to find out. When I first visited it in the early days of our launch I felt that we had room for improvement. I am very pleased to say that, based on the past 6 months, the results have shown a substantial improvement for The BFD.
Out of the top 15 media sources with the least reporting bias The BFD came 4th, beating Stuff, NewstalkZB, The Spinoff, RadioNZ, TVNZ, Kiwiblog, Newsroom, The Daily Blog, Newshub, Scoop and The Standard.
It is interesting to note that the number one spot goes to a site that, in 6 months, only published 292 political articles compared to the 2,816 political articles published by The BFD. Also, the third place site only published 946 political articles compared to our 2,816. That we did so well despite publishing substantially more political content is a real feather in our cap.
You will also note when looking at the results below that there are only two right-leaning media sites in New Zealand today. Of those two, The BFD is the less biased.
Top 15 Media Sources by Least Political Reporting Bias
Oct 1 2019 to May 2 2021
How MediaBias Works
The MediaBias website measures political bias using a machine learning model that evaluates the sentiment of sentences from news articles containing the names of New Zealand Members of Parliament (MPs) and political parties.
The process for calculating the bias of each media source involves collecting and filtering news articles, entity and sentiment analysis, and the calculation of bias scores.
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