It's a problem. There are various "anti-media-bias" organisations, most of which are themselves pushing some extreme view and denouncing opposition as bias. Even defining 'left' and 'right' is country-specific. Then you have the Overton Window problem that lobbying intends to actually move what is considered the 'centre' around.
Then you get back-formation of labels depending on party loyalty, which is a particularly bad problem in two-party systems. Something will get labelled as 'left' because it's supported by the Democrats or 'right' because it's supported by the Republicans, not the other way round. Widespread overuse of "socialist" and "liberal" as terms of abuse rather than descriptors makes this worse.
Then there's the question of whether newspapers should simply report what people say, or make their own efforts to determine whether it bears any relation to reality. Sometimes this is impossible: the greatest piece of anti-libel hedging I've ever seen was an article calling Leon Brittan a paedophile, which was comprised entirely of reported speech.
For clustering, see http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20050415-my_country... : an attempt at reduced-preconception data-driven partitioning of viewpoints. It seems to have held up rather well over the past decade: people attempting to look for common factors driving the Brexit vote have found that the strongest correlate is being pro-capital-punishment. The old left/right axis seems to be subordinate to the modern pro-/anti-internationalist one.
Then you get back-formation of labels depending on party loyalty, which is a particularly bad problem in two-party systems. Something will get labelled as 'left' because it's supported by the Democrats or 'right' because it's supported by the Republicans, not the other way round. Widespread overuse of "socialist" and "liberal" as terms of abuse rather than descriptors makes this worse.
Then there's the question of whether newspapers should simply report what people say, or make their own efforts to determine whether it bears any relation to reality. Sometimes this is impossible: the greatest piece of anti-libel hedging I've ever seen was an article calling Leon Brittan a paedophile, which was comprised entirely of reported speech.
For clustering, see http://www.ex-parrot.com/~chris/wwwitter/20050415-my_country... : an attempt at reduced-preconception data-driven partitioning of viewpoints. It seems to have held up rather well over the past decade: people attempting to look for common factors driving the Brexit vote have found that the strongest correlate is being pro-capital-punishment. The old left/right axis seems to be subordinate to the modern pro-/anti-internationalist one.