A Political Map of the News

By Chris Wilson and Jeremy Singer-Vine and Chadwick Matlin

April 29, 2010

One of the most common criticisms of the news in the Internet age is that people read only stories whose slant they agree with. Two University of Chicago researchers challenged that assumption in a paper that argued that people are far more open-minded to opposing ideas than we think.

To visualize this conclusion, we took the raw data, generously provided by the researchers, and presented it as a treemap using Flare, the infinitely useful Actionscript library.

The visualization displays each publication as a block whose size is proportional to its number of visitors and whose color represents the ideology of the audience, from red to gray to blue. As one can see, most of the big blocks are comparatively close to the political center.