This would probably be better as an article but I’m just spitballing an idea because it’s something that we should probably talk about a lot more.
Obviously one of the things we focus on when it comes to identifying bullshit in the media is whether the source has a history of being biased in one of the two political directions. Obviously nothing in politics is as simple as left versus right, but most of the people who discuss politics are precisely that simple, so we’ll use that model for now and not go off on a tangent about it.
So yeah, paying attention to left versus right bias is important, but one of the things that’s glossed over almost every time when discussing media bias, by the media itself—and for fairly obvious reasons—is the bias towards revenue for the media organization (or lack thereof).
For profit journalism in the modern era, as we have seen, is less incentivized by the quality and accuracy of the reporting as it is by the audiences to which it must cater in order to turn a profit by attracting advertisers or subscribers. This of course has always been the case to some degree, but in the era of social media where a person has thousands of different choices to build their own bubble of information around themselves, the competition is fierce, and those incentives are perverse.
The only decent heuristic to screen for this kind of bias is whether or not the organization is for profit or non-profit, such as the difference between a cable news organization like Fox or MSNBC, or something like the Guardian which is funded mainly by a trust. This is by no means a perfect heuristic, just an initial screening method to sift the larger chunks of bullshit and deal with the finer grained bits as best you can.