User:Valereee/Vanessa Otero

Vanessa Otero is the founder of media watchdog organization Ad Fontes Media and creator of its Media Bias Chart.

Early life and education
Otero was raised in San Diego, California, and attended UCLA, graduating with a BA in English. She received a Juris Doctor from the University of Denver in 2013 and was admitted to the US patent bar in 2014

Career
Otero worked for ten years in sales before attending law school. After law school she worked as a patent and trademark attorney for Neugeboren O'Dowd in Boulder.

In 2016 Otero, "alarmed" that many of her friends, coworkers, and family were sharing polarizing, low-reliability media stories when discussing politics on social media, created a diagram to demonstrate to friends and family which media outlets were partisan. According to Otero:

"In the past, national evening news programs, local evening news programs, and the front pages of print newspapers were dominated by fact-reporting stories. Now, however, many sources people consider to be ‘news sources’ are actually dominated by analysis and opinion pieces."

According to Newsy, "Otero’s chart categorizes the media landscape using two domains: facts vs. editorializing, and left- vs. right-leaning views." Otero told Newsy the chart's vertical axis represented quality and the horizontal axis represented bias, saying, "In general, the better quality, best quality stuff is at the top. The lowest quality stuff is at the bottom."

Otero published the chart on her blog, All Generalizations Are False, after which it became a viral phenomenon and was adopted as an Internet meme on the Imgur image sharing service in December 2016. In 2018, after the chart had gone viral, she told MarketWatch, "I think the extremes are very toxic and damaging to the country. These extreme sources play on people’s worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people’s confirmation biases."

In February of 2018 she founded Ad Fontes Media, a media watchdog organization, and by 2019 was releasing similar charts based on local media outlets. In April of 2018 she launched a crowdfunding campaign to "scale up" the technology. According to Otero, analysts with Ad Fontes read more than 10 "competing news stories" when assessing them on spectrum of accuracy, rating them on a scale of factuality.

Personal life
Otero moved to Colorado in 2008 and lives in Boulder. She enjoys snowboarding and likes dogs. She is a member of the board for NPR radio station KUNC and is on the advisory board for Media Literacy Now.