FrIdéo
A continuous ideology scale for thirty French news outlets, built by asking nine independent sources the same question and reporting where they agree and where they do not.
By Amr Sobhy
Oral presentation · Trento, September 2026
FrIdéo places thirty outlets across print, broadcast and digital-native formats on one continuous scale, each with a position, a confidence interval, and every input published. Editorial ideology has no ground truth, so the scale is not offered as a verdict on any newsroom: it reports what nine unrelated bodies of evidence say when asked the same question, including the places where they say different things.
- Year
- 2026
- Venue
- ICNLSP 2026
- Oral presentation · Trento, September 2026
- Research area
- French media, Political communication, Computational journalism, Media ideology
At a glance
30
national news outlets, print to digital-native
9
independent sources of evidence per outlet
0.84
average correlation between sources sharing no data
15
outlets whose interval includes zero: unresolved
The results
The scale
Thirty outlets, from L’Humanité (−2.41) to Valeurs actuelles (+1.87).
Select any outlet to see its score, its confidence interval, and how much evidence sits behind it.
Points are the estimated position; whiskers are 95% confidence intervals. Larger points have more independent evidence behind them. Band shading marks the seven descriptive labels. Those exist to make the chart readable, and no analysis in the paper uses them.
Background
What existed before
How far apart are Le Point and L’Express? Is La Croix further from the centre than Les Echos? Where does Ouest-France actually sit? Each of these questions has a partial answer in the existing literature, and the partial answers do not compose. They cover different outlets, in different years, on different scales, and several were built to answer something else.
| Reference | What it reports | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Pew Research Center (2018) | How readers perceive the outlet | 8 outlets, 2018 |
| Cagé et al. (2024) | Political guest bookings | broadcast only |
| Cointet et al. (2021) | Continuous positions from a link network | 2019 snapshot |
| Benson & Hallin (2007) | Comparative content analysis | 3 outlets, in depth |
| Media Bias/Fact Check | A categorical label from a volunteer rating panel | 15 of 30 |
| Ad Fontes Media | A categorical label from a rating panel | 9 of 30 |
| FrIdéo | A continuous position with an error bar | 30 of 30 |
No single source settles it
Editorial ideology has no ground truth. Nobody can hand over the true position of Le Monde: there is no experiment that settles it, no register to consult, and no number the paper itself could supply even if it wanted to. Outlets resist self-categorisation, readers conflate what an outlet is with what they think it is, and a content analysis deep enough to settle the question is too expensive to run across thirty newsrooms.
Every method therefore picks a proxy: the readers, the link structure, a panel of experts. Each is a real signal with a known failure. Reader partisanship measures the audience rather than the newsroom. A link network captures an eighteen-month window ending in 2019 and then goes stale. An expert panel inherits the expertise, and the blind spots, of whoever sits on it.
The alternative is not a better proxy. It is more of them. If nine sources built by different people, using different methods, for unrelated purposes all place Valeurs actuelles to the right of Le Monde, that agreement carries more weight than any one of them being clever. Where they disagree, the disagreement is itself information: it indicates that the question is open at that outlet, which is what an error bar is for.
“We do not claim to have recovered the true position of any outlet. We claim a scale that is internally consistent, robust to modelling choices, and convergent with independent external evidence.”
FrIdéo, §6
The evidence
Nine witnesses
Nine sources, each answering the same question about the same thirty outlets. What matters is how little they have in common.
| Witness | What it looks at | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns it | The owner’s political position, from ownership registries and press reporting | 28 / 30 |
| Who it links to | The outlet’s place in the web of French political hyperlinks | 30 / 30 |
| What readers think | Where the audience places it, from survey data | 8 / 30 |
| What it says it is | Self-declared orientation, from editorial charters and statutes | 18 / 30 |
| How it is described | Third-party journalistic and encyclopedic profiling | 27 / 30 |
| Who it puts on air | Political guest bookings, from academic broadcast panel data | 3 / 30 |
| Media Bias/Fact Check rating | The panel’s published categorical label | 15 / 30 |
| Ad Fontes Media rating | A second rating panel’s independent label | 9 / 30 |
| What it actually publishes | Ideologically loaded vocabulary in its own articles, 2024–2025 | 30 / 30 |
| What it was founded to be | Founding editorial tradition, a fallback used only where direct evidence is thin | 30 / 30 |
An ownership registry, a survey of readers, a map of hyperlinks and half a million articles have nothing to do with each other. They were assembled by different people, in different decades, for purposes that had nothing to do with placing outlets on a scale. That independence is not incidental. It is the entire reason their agreement means anything.
How nine become one
The nine are put on a common footing and averaged, but not blindly. Some outlets are exhaustively documented; others barely exist in the record. Rather than pretend we know as much about Blast as about Le Monde, the more independent evidence an outlet has, the more its score is driven by that evidence; the less it has, the more it falls back on what the outlet was founded to be, and the wider its error bar becomes.
Le Monde has seven sources behind it. Franceinfo, the best-covered outlet on the panel, has eight. Blast has four. The arithmetic that turns those counts into a weighting is set out below.
No single source is load-bearing. Drop any one of the nine, rebuild the entire scale from scratch, and the ordering barely moves: the rank correlation with the full model never falls below 0.992.
The model, written out
The whole measurement is five lines. Each family is standardised on its own, the available families are averaged, that average is blended with the founding-tradition prior according to how much evidence the outlet has, and the result is re-standardised across the panel.
- zik = xik − x̄kskEach family k is standardised across only the outlets it covers. Missing values are left missing rather than imputed as zero, which would pull uncovered outlets toward the centre.
- z̄idir = 1niΣzikThe mean of whichever families cover outlet i. Unweighted, for the reason given below.
- αi = nini + λ(λ = 2)How far the score follows the direct evidence. λ = 2 is a design choice, not an estimate: two sources should not override the historical record unaided.
- zibl = αi z̄idir + (1 − αi) zistrThe blend of direct evidence and the structural prior, which encodes founding tradition on a five-point grid scaled by 1.5.
- finali = zibl − μBσBRe-standardised across all 30 outlets, giving a zero-mean, unit-variance scale. This is the published score.
2 sources
α = 0.50
4 sources
α = 0.67
7 sources
α = 0.78
What λ = 2 means in practice. An outlet with two sources is placed half by evidence and half by its founding tradition; one with seven is placed almost entirely by evidence. Outlets with no direct evidence fall back on the prior entirely.
The direct mean is deliberately unweighted rather than weighted by each family’s precision. Family dispersion is largest for the sources that diverge from the consensus, notably the article-text family, so precision weighting would quietly suppress the one contemporary signal the model is built to keep visible.
The core finding
How much the sources agree
If the nine witnesses were each measuring their own thing, readership here and ownership there, their placements would scatter. They do not scatter, and the degree to which they do not is the central result.
- 1
The sources track each other
Across every pair of the six best-covered witnesses, the correlation runs from 0.71 to 0.94, averaging 0.84. Ownership registries, a 2018–2019 hyperlink network, a reader survey and half a million articles agree with each other about where thirty newsrooms sit.
- 2
There is one dimension here, not several
A standard test for whether several measurements are really tracking one underlying thing finds that a single dimension accounts for 88.5% of what the sources share; the next accounts for 7.4%. We also went looking for the most likely second dimension: La Croix is right-of-centre through Catholic tradition, Les Echos through economic liberalism, so a distinct cultural-versus-economic axis should put them at opposite ends. They differ by 0.35 of a standard deviation. If that axis is there, this evidence does not find it.
- 3
It separates groups it was never shown
We removed the Media Bias/Fact Check family entirely, rebuilt the scale without it, and asked whether the outlets MBFC calls left and right separate on the rebuilt scale. They separate without overlap: every right-group outlet scores above every left-group outlet, an ordering that would arise by chance about once in 1,700 times. Repeating the test with only the five families that share no method with MBFC leaves the agreement essentially unchanged, so it is not an artefact of shared method.
Per-outlet source spread
Each dot is one independent source placing this outlet. The diamond is the published score.
- Who owns it−1.06
- Who it links to−0.18
- What readers think−0.06
- How it is described−0.78
- Media Bias/Fact Check rating−0.84
- Ad Fontes Media rating−0.84
- What it actually publishes−0.34
- Published score−0.71
7 sources have data for this outlet. They span 0.99 of a standard deviation.
One of the best-evidenced outlets on the panel: seven of the nine sources have data on it, and no single one of them is doing the work. This is what the typical case looks like.
What this does not establish
None of this shows the scale is correct, because there is nothing for it to be correct against. It shows that the scale is internally consistent, stable under every perturbation tested, and pointing in the same direction as evidence it never saw.
Time
Change over time: the JDD
Ownership registries, hyperlink networks and rating panels are snapshots. A scale built only from those would describe the French press as it was when its sources were compiled, in one case 2018–2019. One of the nine witnesses reads what outlets published this year, which means the fused score can register a newsroom that changes.
On 22 June 2023 the Journal du Dimanche was handed to a new editorial director: Geoffroy Lejeune, until that week the editor of the far-right weekly Valeurs actuelles. The newsroom struck for forty days. Dozens of journalists left rather than work under the new line. That is the public record.
The measurable question is different: did the paper itself change, in print? We ran the text witness on three windows of the JDD’s own articles: before the handover, immediately after, and a year later. Nothing about the measurement changed between them.
- Jan 2022 – Jun 2023before−0.1622 June 2023: handover
- Aug – Dec 2023immediately after+0.30
- Jan – Jun 2024about a year later+0.57
What moved was not whether the JDD wrote about immigration. It always did. It was how. Before the handover a phrase like « immigration massive » appeared mostly inside quotation marks, reported as somebody else’s language. After, it appeared as the paper’s own description.
This is one outlet, and one we went looking at because we knew the date. It shows the scale can register an editorial change; it says nothing about how often such changes happen. For outlets whose line is stable the same witness barely moves: the correlation between its 2024 and 2025 readings is 0.95, and no outlet crosses a label boundary between those years. Stability where you would expect stability is the other half of the evidence.
Eight of the nine witnesses are structural and update slowly. The text witness reads 2024–2025, but some of the other evidence dates to 2018. An outlet that shifted last month may not have moved here yet.
Read this before quoting
How to misread this
Five readings this scale does not support, each with the statement the evidence does support.
Le Monde is centre-left, according to science.
On a thirty-outlet scale where zero is the sector average, Le Monde sits at −0.71.
The label is a reading aid. The measurement is the number, and the number is relative to this specific set of newsrooms.
Le Parisien leans further right than BFMTV.
Both sit in the unresolved centre; the scale does not separate them.
Their intervals overlap heavily, and a difference smaller than the error bar is not a difference. Where an outlet is being described in print, the interval is the number to quote rather than the point estimate.
Atlantico is further right than CNews.
Atlantico’s estimate is +1.08, but it is one of five outlets with thin evidence.
About a third of Atlantico’s score comes from its founding profile rather than direct measurement, and its interval is correspondingly wide. Sparse outlets are the wrong place to draw fine distinctions.
Le Figaro scores +1.02, roughly the same as some German or American outlet.
Nothing. There is no valid version of this sentence.
The scale is defined by this panel. Add or remove outlets and every number changes. These scores are not comparable to any other country, rating system, or outlet set.
This shows which outlets are trustworthy.
This shows where outlets sit on a left–right axis.
Position is not quality. A far-left outlet and a far-right outlet can both be scrupulously accurate; a centrist one can be sloppy. This says nothing about accuracy, rigour, or good faith.
No outlet was asked. Some publish an editorial charter, and that is one of the nine inputs. But this is an external measurement, not a self-declaration, and no newsroom was consulted before publication or has endorsed its score.
Questions
Citation
If you use the FrIdéo scores or the replication code, please cite the current version.
@inproceedings{sobhy2026frideo,
title = {{FrIdéo}: French News Outlet Ideology Scoring via Multi-Source
Evidence Fusion and Distancing-Aware Lexical Scoring},
author = {Sobhy, Amr},
booktitle = {Proceedings of ICNLSP 2026},
year = {2026}
}Accepted for oral presentation at ICNLSP 2026, Trento. The citation will be updated when final publication details are available.
This work was supported by
Contact
For research questions, collaborations, or media inquiries.
Amr Sobhy