Bias

Sensationalism is used to make you click on article and read it (aka clickbait). These types of articles use fear, anger, or excitement to capture your attention and make you want to read it.

This is an image from an emergency food and survival gear online retailer. They use a clickbait title to get people to read the article and hopefully buy their egg products.

Pay careful attention to the word choice and language used by the author. Words can have positive or negative connotations to different groups of people.

AllSides produced this chart comparing how different news organizations referred to the same issue. 

Articles that are written from one point of view and do not address other sides are biased.

This is an example of a news article from Mother Jones. This heavily-opinion based piece is written from a liberal point-of-view.

In addition to articles that are one-sided, you should also be leery of any article that is opinion-heavy. These types of articles are opinion-based and lack evidence or facts. 

This is an article from the NY Post using bold language to capture attention and persuade the audience to agree with the author's opinion that the mayor is "woke" and supports rapists. 

If the author is anonymous or unidentifiable, this is a bad sign. Authors take pride in their work - unless it is something that is biased or written without credible evidence.

It is easy to see the bias against Meghan Markle when you see the side-by-side comparison. In addition to the word choices, the article published about Markle is by "Sunday Reporter" (aka anonymous), whereas the nicer article has an author attached.