Saturday 13 March 2010

Where does your newspaper stand?

Long years ago I had visited this site (politicalcompass.org) after it was mentioned in Times of India. Those were the days of dial up connection and limited hours of usage allowed per month. The site offers a test which places you on a scale of leftist to rightist and the Y axis gives you your position on the line from Authoritarian to Libertarian. I recommend that you take the test on yourself. It may not be 100% accurate as it is designed for developed countries but it certainly isn’t far from the truth.

I found out that long ago in 8th standard, when I first tried it I was far more to the right than I am now. I was also a lot more authoritarian.

There are several things we believe to be true as a common sense opinion or urban legend. It is always a pleasure to see something that backs it up with numbers. Now I think it is generally believed that The Hindu is left of centre and Times of India is to the right of it. Of the Indian Express I’ve heard it called left of center, right of center, both left and right etc.. What I intend to do is to examine beliefs of this kind and see which way the editorials of 3 newspapers argue on each issue. I shall make a note of their opinion on each issue and then use it to take the quiz on their behalf. This should give us a good idea of where they stand. I’m picking these newspapers because I’m anyway reading them. Depending on how it goes, I might just throw Star of Mysore and Vijaya Karnataka into the mix. I may have to do this over a long period so don’t expect any quick results.

You can track my tracking of the newspaper over here. I will be doing my best to update it everyday. I shall be relying upon my readers (yes both of you) to keep me motivated. Something I wont promise but will try my very best is to make summaries of all these editorials available. It is a big project. And requires a lot of hard work. Any help will be welcome and much appreciated. I can't offer much of a reward apart from an acknowledgment and my undying love and affection.

Historically whenever I have promised to post something on this blog I have not kept the promise. Hopefull I shall break the jinx this time.

However, if I am happy with how it goes. I will consider doing the same for top parliamentarians and judges.

4 comments:

X said...

Ah ha, I would like to follow your progress on this. I don't get Hindu or Indian Express but ToI is deteriorating day by day (They have lapped up Chetan Bhagat for crying out loud). I stand by HT for now, the Sunday columns are totally worth reading

vikramhegde said...

Heheh... Only when they got a Chetan Bhagat column did I realize that the rest of the paper is not written by him. But yeah, ToI I read because I can't kill the habit. I shall put up another link soon. Containing summaries of editorials each day which I shall use to fill in this spreadsheet later.

Chetan Rao said...

@ "...designed for developed countries..."
*dons jingoistic "patriot" cap*
How dare you suggest that India is an undeveloped country?!?! We're the world's next superpower, maan.

And Star of Mysore?! Seriously??? I really doubt they have any journalistic content worth anybody's while, whatsoever. Not meant as a personal insult to KBG, but I think some of his pieces are er... plagiarized. Or atleast ghostwritten, to say the least. I find it exceedingly hard to believe that the same person who often writes mindless parochial gibberish, can also sometimes write opinion columns with very sharp wit and acid rhetoric.

PS: Wow, great blog you've got going here!!! Man, I really need more souls like you to hang out with, heh heh. Keep up the good work and keep 'em posts coming!

vikramhegde said...

Thanks :). Next superpower? But of course we are. Come to think of it should this come to pass, I should be very very afraid.

As regards Star of Mysore. I'm one of those people who will crib and crib about something but somehow seem to be addicted to it.

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