The Atlantic
The Atlantic's media bias rating is featured on the AllSides Media Bias Chart™.
The Atlantic has a Left bias.
The Atlantic Bias Rating Moved from Lean Left to Left in October 2022 Small Group Editorial Review
In October 2022 an AllSides Small Group Editorial Review of The Atlantic was conducted by reviewers from the left, right, and center. They rated the Atlantic Left. Across the panel, they noticed consistent sensationalism in word choice and slant. AllSides changed The Atlantic’s AllSides Media Bias Rating™ from Lean Left to Left following this review.
One reviewer noted that many of the headlines on the homepage were sensationalist (emphasis ours):
- The Climate Economy Is About to Explode
- Is This the End of ‘Socialism for the Rich'?
- Russia’s Nuclear Bluster Is a Sign of Panic
- Doug Mastriano’s Lunatic Appeal
- The United States of Confederate America
Reviewers on the left and center noticed several articles favored Democrats and criticized Republicans as “election-deniers”:
- The Next Presidential Election Is Happening Right Now in the States
- ‘Stop the Steal’ Is a Metaphor
- Bad Losers
The reviewer on the left pointed out that the story choice could be mixed at times – citing a story on boys and men, which is a topic more often covered by the right.
The story choice of The Atlantic overall demonstrated story choice bias by focusing on the climate, long COVID, policing, and Trump-era policies. Reviewers from the left and center saw significant slant in the Atlantic’s reporting on policing. The article says, “Sometimes cops lie. Sometimes they shoot a man in the back and leave him facedown on the ground but tell the public something else,” without presenting any opposing, favorable views of the police.
About The Atlantic
The Atlantic is an American magazine (founded as The Atlantic Monthly) in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it has held for more than 150 years. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets, and encouraging major careers. It published leading writers' commentary on abolition, education, and other major issues in contemporary political affairs.
Funding, Financing and Ownership
Note: Funding and ownership is not taken into account when determining AllSides Media Bias Ratings. While it's true ownership and financial interests can affect what goes to print, our bias ratings are determined by assessing the bias of content only. We provide financial and ownership information as an FYI to our readers.
In 1999, David G. Bradley became the owner of The Atlantic, Bradley owns other media outlets and journals under the umbrella of Atlantic Media. On July 28, 2017 the Emerson Collective, owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, acquired a majority stake of The Atlantic from David Bradley. David Bradley still owns a minority share of the Atlantic.
Financing and ownership information last updated February 22, 2021. If you think this information is out of date or needs to be updated, please contact us.
Type of Content
Approved Story
1
Format
Region
News Item Format
Standard
Reopening is a mess. Photographs of crowds jostling outside bars, patrons returning to casinos, and a tightly packed, largely maskless audience listening to President Donald Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore all show the U.S. careening back to pre-coronavirus norms. Meanwhile, those of us watching at home are like the audience of a horror movie, yelling “Get out of there!” at our screens. As despair rises, the temptation to shame people who fail at social distancing becomes difficult to resist.
But Americans’ disgust should be aimed at governments and institutions, not at one another. Individuals are being asked to decide for themselves what chances they should take, but a century of research on human cognition shows that people are bad at assessing risk in complex situations. During a disease outbreak, vague guidance and ambivalent behavioral norms will lead to thoroughly flawed thinking. If a business is open but you would be foolish to visit it, that is a failure of leadership.
Since March, Americans have lived under a simple instruction: Stay home. Now, even as case counts spike in states such as Arizona, Florida, and Texas, many other states continue to ease restrictions on businesses, and suddenly the burden is on individuals to engage in some of the most frustrating and confounding cost-benefit analyses of their life. Pandemic decision making implicates at least two complex cognitive tasks: moral reasoning and risk evaluation.
My academic subspecialty is the psychology of judgment and decision making. The foundational experiment in this discipline began with the prompt: “Imagine that the United States is preparing for an outbreak of an unusual Asian disease.” (The glibly xenophobic use of “Asian” as a shortcut to inducing fear and confusion is a subject for another article.) The experiment asked participants to choose between two public-health policies: In option A, one-third of the population survives for sure, but no one else makes it; in option B, there is a one-third chance that all survive, but a two-thirds chance that none do. For some participants, these options were described in terms of how many lives would be saved; for others, how many would die. Participants consistently chose option A, which offered certainty, if they were thinking in terms of potential gains (saving lives) but option B, which involved more risk, if they were thinking about potential losses (dying). A weighty decision was swayed dramatically by the semantic framing. (This observation earned one of the experimenters the Nobel Prize for economics.)