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Find out how slanted your favorite news sources are using this updated Media Bias Chart [1]

['Jennifer Sandlin']

Date: 2025-08-15

I've used Ad Fontes Media's "Media Bias Chart" for years in my cultural studies courses, to provide students with an accessible illustration of how new sources always include deeply embedded political and ideological perspectives, and to give them a sense of the importance of developing critical media skills. If you are a fan of their charts, which they have been publishing for almost a decade now, you'll be happy to know that they just released the latest version — number 13!

On their website, Ad Fontes Media explains that to create the charts, over 60 analysts who are trained in "non-partisan content analysis methodology," analyze the reliability and political bias of thousands of news sources, including both individual articles as well as full episodes of radio or television shows, podcasts, etc. Ad Fontes (which means "to the source" in Latin) provides this overview of their methodology:

Our analysts go through an initial 30 hours of training plus an additional 40 hours of ongoing training per year. Our analysts include academics, journalists, librarians, lawyers, military veterans, civil service professionals, and other professions that require high levels of rhetorical and analytical skills. Each individual article and episode is rated by a pod of at least three human analysts at the same time. Each pod is politically balanced, meaning it contains one person who self-identifies as being right-leaning, one as center, and one as left-leaning. Articles and episodes are rated in three-person live panels conducted in shifts over Zoom. Analysts first read each article and rate them on their own, then immediately compare scores. If there are discrepancies in the scores, they discuss and adjust scores if necessary. The three analysts' ratings are averaged to produce the overall article rating. Sometimes articles are rated by larger panels of analysts for various reasons – for example, if there are outlier scores, the article may be rated by more than three analysts. To date, we have manually rated over 86,200 individual articles and shows. Each article or show is rated by at least three analysts – one left, one center, and one right, politically – which means we have over 258,600 individual ratings. We have fully rated over 3,900 individual news sources. This includes more than 2,500 web/print sources, 740 podcasts and 640 individual TV/video programs that fall under the category of news and "news-like" sources.

The most recent chart maps websites, television news, podcasts and more according to their political bias (X axis, from "most extreme left" to "most extreme right") and news value and reliability (Y axis, from "contains inaccurate/fabricated info" to "original fact reporting, high effort"). On the interactive website, you can search by media ownership, filter by media type or source, adjust for reliability and bias, and more.

From my quick read of the chart, USAFacts has the highest reliability rating (50.24) and the least bias (-0.05), followed closely by NPR News Now (49.33 reliability, -0.28 bias), WSJ: The Journal (47.11 reliability, -0.50 bias), Chron (The Chronicle) (46.63 reliability, -0.60 bias), and BNO News (46.37 reliability, -0.40 bias). I was curious so I looked up Boing Boing on the free app (because the website version doesn't include it in the "default display") and saw that it's rated 19.48 for reliability (they use this rating to describe Boing Boing as "unreliable" and "problematic" which I am, frankly, offended by ha ha) and -14.22 for bias (they call Boing Boing "strong left" which, well, ok). For comparison, one of the absolute worst rated "news" sources is InfoWars, with a 6.67 reliability score and a 31.67 bias rating.

You can view and download the static version of the new Media Bias Chart here, view and play with the interactive version here, and read more about their news media analysis methodology here. And here, you can scroll through all of the charts published by Ad Fontes Media since October 2016 and see how they've changed over the past decade.

Previously:

• Can anti-transgender bias in media be measured?

• How Fox News controls the conversation at every midterm election

• Why CNN Struggles to Cover The Economic Panic

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/08/15/find-out-how-slanted-your-favorite-news-sources-are-using-this-updated-media-bias-chart.html

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