Nieman Lab
Nieman Lab has a Center media bias.
AllSides conducted an editorial review of Nieman Lab on March 19, 2020, and unanimously determined that Nieman Lab maintains a Center bias. The team was impressed that Nieman Lab's reporting is largely objective and factual, and that the outlet does not employ common types of bias typically found in outlets with a partisan slant. Nieman Lab often includes lengthy quotes from sources. The site uses neutral photos and provides a lot of context. Nieman Lab does not cover issues through an overtly political lens. It should be noted that Nieman Lab covers the media industry, including businesses and trends within it, and not political issues themselves. The site's "What We're Reading" section includes headlines from a diverse array of topics and outlets.
About Nieman Lab
Nieman Lab bills itself as "an attempt to help journalism figure out its future in an Internet age."
"The Internet has brought forth an unprecedented flowering of news and information," reads Nieman Lab's About page. "But it has also destabilized the old business models that have supported quality journalism for decades. Good journalists across the country are losing their jobs or adjusting to a radically new news environment online. We want to highlight attempts at innovation and figure out what makes them succeed or fail. We want to find good ideas for others to steal. We want to help reporters and editors adjust to their online labors; we want to help traditional news organizations find a way to survive; we want to help the new crop of startups that will complement — or supplant — them."
Nieman Lab is part of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard.
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Journalism faces a well-documented crisis of trust. This long-running decline in public confidence in the press is part of a broader skepticism that has developed about the trustworthiness of institutions more generally — leading to an overall trust recession that worries observers who speculate about the endgame of this downward spiral.
But might we see these issues of news and trust in a new light if we reconsidered our assumptions about what actually leads people to develop trust in journalism?
Consider, for example, how journalists for decades have sought to establish trust and confidence by focusing on their democratic responsibility to provide objective information — in which case, trust is presumed to be a product of faithfully adhering to standards and neutrality. In that case, reclaiming trust could be a matter of “getting back to basics,” as it were, and reporting facts in a way that more clearly communicates what people need to know, with the independence and distance that people have come to expect from journalists.