The Week - News
The Week's news section has a Lean Left bias. AllSides provides a separate media bias rating for The Week's Opinion section.
June 2021 Independent Review: The Week Moved to Lean Left
AllSides moved The Week's media bias rating from Center to Lean Left in June 2021 following an independent review by AllSides editors.
Jan. 2020 Independent Review
In January 2020, AllSides decided to split the bias rating for The Week into two following an independent review by members of the AllSides team that found the bias of The Week's opinion section differs significantly from its news section.
AllSides rates the bias of online content only; our ratings do not apply to print, radio, video, or TV content.
In its news articles, The Week frequently offers both the left and right perspective and is relatively balanced.
The bias of The Week's opinion and commentary section leans left overall. Notably, the Week's news portion is much more easily found in its print magazine than online; The Week's homepage features mostly commentary, giving its homepage a Lean Left bent.
AllSides initially rated The Week - News bias as Lean Left, but following an AllSides independent review in July 2019 in which we analyzed changes made by The Week, we changed its bias to Center.
The Week describes itself as a source helping readers to understand "all the issues, from all angles." The Week began with a print magazine 20 years ago, and now includes digital editions. The Week claims it is "designed for readers who want to know what's going on in the world, but don’t have the time to read a daily newspaper from cover to cover - let alone all of them."
As of April 2017, a majority of the 1,700 AllSides users who voted agreed with a bias rating of Center. However, at the same time, over 800 community members disagreed. A follow-up survey of those who disagreed revealed survey participants gave the magazine an average bias rating of 60.8. This rating is on the edge between Center and Lean Left biases, but is not enough evidence to change The Week's rating at this point.
About The Week
The Week is a weekly British news magazine founded in 1995 by Jolyon Connell, formerly of the right-of center Sunday Telegraph. Its main focus is news and commentary pertaining to important world events, as well as science, business and the arts. Designed with the goal of informing readers who want to know what is going on in the world but do not have the time to read a daily newspaper, the magazine is printed in both the United Kingdom and the United States. It also includes digital editions, with weekly apps and a website that publishes distinctive online stories throughout the week.
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Stephen Colbert scheduled Bill O'Reilly as a guest more than a month ago, but since he was on Monday's Late Show, the two TV hosts started with the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida. Colbert asked O'Reilly how he would respond if he were president, and a very loose and expansive O'Reilly said Orlando wasn't a "tragedy," but a battle in a larger war against Islamic jihadis. They don't represent all of Islam, he said, "but there's enough of them to cause the world pain on a consistent basis. So that's the problem." Colbert noted there's a different way to frame the problem, and the conversation shifted to guns and gun regulation.
O'Reilly wasn't buying Colbert's frame. "It's my job as a news analyst to find a solution to the problem, and the solution is not some kind of federal gun control at a level of taking guns away," he said, earning angry murmurs from the audience and a request for silence from Colbert. O'Reilly pointed to gun violence in Chicago, then provided his own counterexample, Australia, finally arguing that gun violence has also dropped sharply in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, because the U.S. locked up "violent offenders, including drug gangsters."
"My solution to the gun problem is this," O'Reilly said. "No. 1: Congress debates which guns are allowed ... It's perfectly legitimate for Congress then to say, 'What kind of rifles should people be able to buy?'" Colbert clarified that a President O'Reilly would be fine with banning assault weapons (he would), then tried to get back to ISIS. "One more point on the guns, because your crew out here is applauding stuff they shouldn't be applauding," O'Reilly said. "What we need to do here is, every crime — every single crime committed with a gun in this country, whether it's Orlando terrorism or whether it's Chicago and the inner-city drug gangs — every crime is then a federal crime," with tough mandatory minimum sentences.