Does the mainstream press have a liberal bias? Yes, and so do most universities. That’s because the media and academia are filled with educated people interested in the pursuit of knowledge and the improvement of society.

Part of being a discerning consumer of news and information is the ability to differentiate between reliable and biased news sources. AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, BBC, The New York Times, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal are all pretty reliable reporters of the facts. Fox News is not. If you’re not sure where a media agency stands, check out the Media Bias Chart.

The Media Bias Chart (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/), developed in 2016 by Denver attorney Vanessa Otero, is a pretty accurate ideological map of the print, broadcast, cable and online media. It plots media companies on a graph with the vertical axis corresponding to how factual an outlet is and the horizontal axis measuring the political bias.

The Associated Press stands atop the media pyramid as the most factual and neutral of news sources. At the bottom of the pyramid out on the far fringes are companies judged to provide “nonsense damaging to public discourse.” On the left, this includes Patribotics, Wonkette, Occupy Democrats and Daily Kos. On the right, it lists InfoWars, The Daily Caller, Breitbart and Fox News.

The rise of alt-right hyper-partisan media sources is in no small way responsible for the decline in civility and the increase in partisanship in this country. They appeal to the fears and prejudices of the weak-minded with nonsense about bogeymen like the Muslim Brotherhood, sharia law, Black Lives Matter, caravans of illegal aliens, Antifa and George Soros.

Some years ago I was a guest on a fairly conservative radio show and was asked how I accounted for the fact that Maine’s 2nd Congressional District is more conservative than the 1st District. That’s easy, I said: education. Folks in southern Maine tend to be better educated than folks in northern Maine. You can imagine the irate calls we got.

Am I saying conservatives are stupid? Of course not. Liberals are not more intelligent than conservatives, but they do tend to be better educated. It wasn’t always that way.

A March 2018 Pew Research Center study, for instance, found that “In 1994, 39 percent of those with a four-year college degree (no postgraduate experience) identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party and 54 percent associated with the Republican Party. In 2017, those figures were exactly reversed.”

Among Americans with post-graduate experience, 63 percent identify with the Democratic Party and just 31 percent lean toward the Republican Party. Maybe that’s why Republicans these days regularly attack higher education.

Educated people in urban and suburban areas tend to more liberal, while less-educated people in rural areas tend to be more conservative. That pretty much explains Maine’s 2nd District.

When you look at a map of educational attainment in Maine you can just about see the two Congressional districts. Southern Maine and the coast to Mount Desert Island have the largest concentration of residents over 25 with post-secondary degrees, ranging from 53 percent in Cumberland County to 40 percent in Hancock County. In the 2nd District, people over 25 with post-secondary degrees account for only 27 percent in Piscataquis and Somerset counties.

Obviously, there are uneducated liberals and well-educated conservatives, but educational attainment is a fairly good predictor of political orientation. A liberal bias is a bias in favor of knowledge, fairness and progress.

No need to apologize for that.

Freelance journalist Edgar Allen Beem lives in Brunswick. The Universal Notebook is his personal, weekly look at the world around him.