Newsweek has been trying to find its way for some time now, sometimes reading like part of the “conservative media,” other times staying in step with the mainstream media leftist bias. Now it is including the device above after all of its articles.
It’s a start. The weaknesses of such subjective ratings are obvious: true ideologues and the hopelessly biased can’t see any news story that isn’t slanted to support their worldview as “fair.” The data presumably can also be rigged by repeat ratings. Nevertheless, I applaud Newsweek’s effort, and would like to see more publications and news organizations use such a ratings system on their stories. Maybe the mere presence of such a check-point will provide incentive to reporters to cool the “advocacy journalism.”
We can help encourage other publication to use a ratings system by rewarding Newsweek. I’m going to use it as a source more often on Ethics Alarms.
Ethics Alarms 
I was a Newsweek subscriber for about thirty years, beginning right after high school, but I dropped it sometime during the Clinton administration, when their coverage of just about everything became hopelessly biased. I began to call it “Opinionweek,” well before I dropped it. It used to be a really good magazine, actually better than Time, in my opinion.
Newsweek has really changed recently. It seems to be searching for a voice, a bit like CNN but more sincerely. We shall see.