Biased Media: Which Sources Are Reliable And Which Are Garbage
By: Daniel Larkin
Tags: Bias, News, Facts, Fake News, Journalism

Biased media is everywhere. And I don’t mean CNN (though they are biased). I mean Newsmax, InfoWars, the Daily Beast, Mother Jones; sources that strongly appeal to a particular, charged base.

For many, biased media is a bigger hub of information than that of objective sources.

Biased media itself is not a problem — when it chooses to lie to push a narrative, however, it undeniably is.

An Analysis Of Different Sources

Ad Fontes Media is one of numerous existing fact checking websites.

It is based in Colorado and was founded in 2014.

They use an analytic team which consists of a diverse set of political views to assess both bias and accuracy in reporting from different sources and you can read more about them here.

It is important to note, however, that Ad Fontes Media is an amateur source for checking information. Though it is deemed as informed & useful by other credible reviewers, such as the Poynter Institute, the methodology for their scoring is not based in math or an algorithm, but rather scores given by an analytic team, and therefore is subject to bias.

However, the articles which it takes from sources to determine its scores are all readily linked to on their website, and Ad Fontes is open in how they assess news sources. It isn’t just numbers slapped on a site or an infographic meant to be shared, though it isn’t a perfect measure, either. Moreover, the team which analyzes the sources and articles are formally trained for that field of work.

The Breakdown

For context, let’s start with how their reliability scale works, how some of the most unbiased sources score, and how high “mainstream” networks score (the television giants like Fox, CNN, MSNBC). If you want to skip to the scores for the biased media sources, scroll down the page after reading how the Ad Fontes scale works.

How It Works: Outlets are scored on their reliability ranging from 0 to 64, where scores above 24 are “generally acceptable,” and scores above 32 are considered “generally good.”

Additionally, their bias is scored on a +/- scale of -42 to +42. The closer to 0, the less biased. The more negative a number, the more biased to the left. The higher a positive number, the more biased to the right.

How Unbiased Sources Scored: To start as a baseline, we will take four outlets with reputations for being as unbiased as media gets: AP, Reuters, BBC, and USA Today.

AP (Associated Press): Bias score is -2.28; it very, very slightly leans left, but is generally unbiased as news gets. Their score for reliability is 48.91: an exceptional score.

Reuters: Bias score is -1.97, even more unbiased than AP. Their score for reliability is 51.63, another top-tier score.

BBC: Bias score is -1.39, reliability score is 48.59.

USA Today: Bias is -4.83, still a relatively neutral score, though there is slight left bias. Reliability score is 46.64.

How The Big TV Networks Scored: For these, we will be assessing how the TV and their corresponding websites scored. The websites were scored separately from the cable networks, so each outlet will have two scores here.

CNN: For their cable TV, CNN scored a bias of -11.87, with a reliability score of 36. For their website, they scored a bias of -10.26 and a reliability of 43.87.

Fox News: For their cable TV, Fox scored a bias of 24.56, with a reliability score of 23.16. For their website, they scored 17.26, with a reliability score of 33.

MSNBC: MSNBC only received one uniform score for both their network and website. They scored a bias of -15.02, with a reliability score of 44.16.

How Biased Media Scored

We are going to compare various sources, heavily biased to the left or right. Each will be labeled as being left or right.

Breitbart (Right): Breitbart scored a bias of 19.60 with a reliability score of 27.45.

The Daily Beast (Left): Daily Beast scored a bias of -17.66 with a reliability score of 36.16.

Mother Jones (Left): Scored a bias of -15.86, with a reliability score of 40.08.

OAN/OANN (Right): Scored a bias of 23.10, with a reliability of 19.59.

Occupy Democrats (Left): Scored a bias of -25.31, with a reliability of 21.54.

Newsmax (Right): Scored a bias of 22.57, with a reliability of 20.81.

Palmer Report (Left): Scored a bias of -26.96, with a reliability of 16.63.

InfoWars (Right): Scored a bias of 27.23, with a reliability of 12.36.

The Daily Caller (Right): Scored a bias of 17.73, with a reliability of 25.09.

A Summary Of The Biased Scores:

All reliability scores below 24, the cutoff for acceptability, fall under some form of “unreliable.” Scores between 24–32 are semi-acceptable. Those scoring above 32 are still heavily biased, but are generally factual in their reporting.

Very Unreliable: Palmer Report & InfoWars

Generally Unreliable: OAN/OANN (One America News Network), Newsmax, Occupy Democrats

Somewhat Reliable: The Daily Caller, Breitbart

Reliable (But Still Biased): The Daily Beast, Mother Jones

The Takeaways

So, from the select sources we’ve looked at today, what have we learned?

Well, on the bright side, sources that are known for their unbiased reporting are, in fact, nearly fully unbiased.

Televised news sources are not very reliable compared to the unbiased sources, in a surprise to no one.

And, lastly, some biased sources are actually still journalism. But you should be equally wary of the fact that an equally large chunk of biased media is pure propaganda.

The biggest takeaway is that you should always research the credibility of a source before you make it a main source of information for yourself, mainstream, biased, or independent.