The Most Liberal, Conservative, and Independents Sites in America, for Real

Yesterday, I wrote that this Gawker chart attempting to show the most liberal news sites on the web was very misleading:

The reason is that Gawker lumps moderates and undecideds in with Republicans, making it look like the vast majority of news readers are conservative.

So, I got similar data from Nielsen which breaks out site readers based on the number of registered Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. There's also numbers apolitical and not-registered-to-vote readers for each site.

Here is a chart similar to Gawker's, but which breaks out the non-Republicans. Independent, apolitical, and not-registered-to-vote groups are combined into one category. The bolder-colored bars near the middle shows the average for the entire set of sites. (click to enlarge)

To the left of the bolder bars are sites that have more registered Democrats than average and to the right are sites with less-than-average Democrats.

A couple of interesting highlights:
- Non-Democrats and non-Republicans make up a sizable chunk of total readership at 31%

- For the entire set of sites, the percentage of Democrats actually outnumbers Republicans 37% to 32%

- The top five American sites with the most-nonpartisan readers:
Time.com - 44%
MTV.com - 41%
New York Post Online - 40%
Digg.com - 39%
The Onion - 38%

To be fair, Gawker does show what it intended to: the most liberal (news) sites on the web. But in the process it also threw some untruths out there.