Speaker 1: A couple years ago, patent attorney Vanessa Otero ran into a problem that just about anyone who's active on social media will recognize.

Speaker 2: It really started in 2016 in the run-up to the last presidential election. I just started becoming very alarmed about the kind of quality and bias of information that people would use to support their arguments to their friends on Facebook. I thought it might be helpful to just kind of map it, like better, worse, left and right. So I just started piecing it together on my own, just to explain to my friends. We've had this overabundance and proliferation of online news sources, and most of it is in the area of analysis and opinion. If people understood that the sources they're consuming are actively making them angrier and polarizing them, then they might choose to consume less of that.

Speaker 1: Otero's chart categorizes the media landscape using two domains — facts vs. editorializing and left vs. right-leaning views.

Speaker 2: It's a two-dimensional taxonomy. So the vertical axis is quality. So in general, the better quality, best quality stuff is at the top, and the lowest quality stuff is at the bottom. The horizontal axis is bias. So you have your neutral or balanced stuff in the middle.

Speaker 1: Viewers will recognize big names like CNN and Fox News, but Otero says she's starting to get requests to add smaller outlets, too. Extreme, partisan sources like Breitbart and Wonkette appear at the ends of the axis. As a whole, the chart provides a frame of reference for a news industry that is growing increasingly partisan.

Speaker 2: So much of the content that we consume right now is telling you how you should feel about a subject. The stories, like when they break and the spin on them, the takes on them 24 hours later, are really revealing.

Speaker 1: Believe it or not, social scientists don't think the polarized media climate has done much permanent damage to democracy — yet. But it's not exactly harmless, either. An analysis of Nielsen data from the Knight Foundation shows a widening gap between liberals who say they trust the media and conservatives who say they don't. The Pew Research Center finds that the most partisan among us are more likely to be steering the broader political conversation. A comprehensive chart of political media, then, could serve as a sort of guide for those who want to make up their own minds. Or to hear Otero tell it — What the media bias chart is, is an anchor. Of course, Otero is just one person with her own biases and blind spots.

Speaker 2: I've taken into account certain criticisms. I have actually made adjustments to certain sources, especially from some of the really earlier versions. If the sample was really unfair, I selected and I can go back and look at that and take those comments into account, especially if I get those comments from a lot of the readers of that source and other sources.

Speaker 1: Until now, Otero has mostly managed the project herself. But she recently finished crowdfunding more than $32,000 to hire more analysts, vet more sources and make her charting process more transparent.

Speaker 2: Right now there are 104 sources. We'd like to include, expand to 200, 300, 400 sources pretty soon on an interactive web-based version. But there's a limit to what I can do on my own. I've developed really robust methodologies, really granular methodologies. The headline, the picture or graphic, the lead or the chyron, and then individual sentences for quality and bias. I've just started recruiting a team of analysts to help me do that. I just really felt a responsibility to improve that as much as I could because people are relying on it and I just fundamentally feel that if you're going to put out information that influences people, which this does, then you have a responsibility to make it as good as you can.

Speaker 1: In the future, Otero hopes her chart could be a sort of consumer reports for media ratings, both in terms of its comprehensive reach and its reputation as a reliable guide.

Speaker 2: I want to make the news consumers smarter and the news media itself better. And those things are both really lofty, but I think it's doable. There are folks who just, if they had this information, would make better choices as consumers of media first and then citizens.