One exercise I like to use when teaching college students about media is to draw a Cartesian coordinate plane, give them each a list of news organizations, and then have them place each one at some X,Y coordinate. You know the kind of graphing-paper chart I mean — like New York magazine’s Approval Matrix, only with National Review and the AP instead of West Elm Caleb and Neil Young,
I tell them the Y-axis represents a publisher’s journalistic quality — a +10 up at the top is the platonic ideal of amazing reporting, a -10 at the bottom is “The Pope Endorsed Donald Trump.”
