Woe, Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart be upon ye

The biggest problem faced by and from the news industry, hands down, is misinformation. Because the news is one big multiplayer game of professional telephone, there are several stages where the truth can transform, alchemy-like, into not-the-truth before it gets to Facebook, or the street, or your biweekly book club or whatever other grassroots rumor mill.

Misinformation can start from a bad source, someone who talks to the press that seems credible, but is either ill-informed themselves or perhaps even deliberately sharing “Alternative Facts” to suit their own agenda. This has happened in my reporting before, usually because of honest mistakes from a source.

Or, it can happen during the translation from a primary source into a secondary one. If a fire chief accurately describes the cause of a fire, the reporter can still fumble things by miswriting the quote, or misunderstanding the details, or not catching the subtext of the statement. This has happened in my reporting before as well, and by my estimation is the cause of most factual errors for local newsrooms.

The third place misinformation occurs is within the newsroom, between the time the reporter finishes the newsgathering process and the moment their story hits your eyeballs. That includes the process of drafting, editing, graphic design and theoretically even printing or delivery.

Unlike at other stages, misinformation caused here is often either deliberate, or at best, caused by irresponsibility on the part of a publication. Most respectable news sources take efforts to cut out bias in this stage. Reporters and editors work in different departments from the people in sales or marketing, to ensure that money doesn’t drive coverage decisions. They don’t let sources “proof read” articles in advance to suggest changes. Many reporters, myself included, refuse to register with a political party or vote in elections they cover, in an effort to internalize objectivity. (Disclaimer: I voted in one bond election before I implemented this policy for myself.)

Some publications are better at this than others. Local papers often lack the resources and time for editors to fact-check articles rather than simply proofread them. Some outlets have a concerning lack of editorial separation, with news coverage uncannily growing to reflect the views of the CEO. Some are shameless partisan outrage machines that deliberately market to people of certain political ideologies, then disproportionately cover whatever news will bring those people to the ballot box every other November.

In any case, the trick in navigating the globalized digital hellscape of modern news media is to answer one question and one question only: is the content you’re reading legit?

It’s a tricky one. We’re all very bad at recognizing when we’re wrong, and by extension, when the news we agree with is wrong. Even when we seek out that kind of thing, it’s hard to quantify just how biased or inaccurate something is, or who owns what publications and whether their name starts with an “R“ or ends with an “-upert Murdoch.“

Enter the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart, or as I like to call it, God’s gift to objective news consumption.

After creating the media watchdog in Colorado in 2018, Founder Vanessa Otero told Newsy (now Scripps News) she hoped the resource would push back against polarization, saying, “If people understood that the sources they consume are actively making them angrier and polarizing them, they might choose to consume less of that."

The chart released its latest update earlier this month, much to my delight.

It’s pretty straightforward: One axis measures the average reliability, or factual basis, of information in prominently featured articles from every publication it tracks, with an index score from 0 to 64. The other axis measures how partisan that article is, based on the review of a three-member panel of professionals who have to pass 40 hours of training, and of whom one must be a Republican, one must be a Democrat, and one must be a moderate. Once a publication has at least five articles scored, its logo appears on the chart at the average coordinates of its articles.

That leaves users with a couple of landmarks. News with a reliability score of above 40 is pretty trustworthy. This is where AP and Reuters and the Weather Channel live, although above 50 is even better, if extremely rare. If it’s below 40, it’s fine, but should probably be fact-checked against other sources before sharing it widely. Anything below 28 gets pretty darn sketchy, entering tabloid territory, and if a source routinely falls below 16, it’s either lying or selling you something, generally refusing to check facts and sometimes fabricating them entirely.

On the other axis, a bias score of +/- 6 (or less) is pretty neutral, while anything between that and +/- 12 is a little skewed. Moving out to +/- 18, you get articles that are “strong” partisan pieces, and exceeding +/- 24 brings you to the realm of “hyper-partisan” and eventually “most extreme” political bias.

A cropped version of the chart is displayed below this paragraph. This version displays the average bias and reliability of every outlet with an audience of 12.4 million or more, zoomed in on the biggest cluster of publications.

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It shows you several things you probably already knew, if you’re being honest with yourself. Most major publications cluster around the center line, showing little to no partisan bias, but on average hover ever-so-slightly left of center. Maybe that’s because most journalists are college-educated, a demographic that correlates with leaning to the left. Still, Wall Street Journal and Fox News Business offer the same level of reliability on the other side of the aisle, which means it’s not as simple as assuming left-leaning people are somehow more capable of being objective, or inherently more likely to work in the news industry.

No outlet ever falls cleanly on the center line because objectivity is a quixotic goal. Reporters, as human beings, are themselves biased. Plus, sometimes, through no fault of their own, they happen to get better quotes from one side of a story, or cover an issue on which one side’s talking points are simply easier to understand. Neutrality is important to shoot for, but impossible to achieve, that’s par for the course.

News coverage as an activity is at least a little inherently biased as well: reporters don’t talk about everything going on, only what they expect their readers/listeners/watchers/audience members to care about. That’s why you hear more about the party-line votes every state legislative session than the far more common unanimous bills required to keep the government running smoothly. And the more there is to say about something, the more likely it is that an article will end up with bias.

It’s important to remember that an outlet’s bias is not an inherent moral failure. Pluralism is an American ideal and it only makes sense that our news has diverse viewpoints. What is a problem is when newsrooms allow their biases to influence coverage, which damages their reliability.

Otero herself, in a five-minute overview video explaining the chart’s methodology, puts it eloquently.

“Things can fall in the middle because they’re minimally biased, or because they’re centrist — which is a bias — or because they’re balanced, showing two ore more sides of the thing,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with liberal or conservative viewpoints, ideologies, moral foundations. We actually need these, and need to be able to debate them to move forward as a society. But the further out you go in terms of bias, the higher correlation there is with low reliability in our modern news landscape.”

One newsletter-style page from the Guardian dated to March, 2019, achieved an impressive reliability index score of 53 in the latest chart. That’s well above the 40-point threshold mentioned above, as well as the 50-point high for any product’s average score. It achieved this despite a partisan score of -19, a number that puts it squarely between “strong left” and “hyper partisan left,” the same as the average score for pieces from The Socialist Alternative, a website that is exactly what it sounds like.

But that example from the Guardian is an outlier. Most news that far to the left falls well below the 40-point reliability line. The same is true of its reflections on the right.

A broader picture reveals that left-leaning outlets seem to cluster around the 40-point reliability mark and between the “skews left” and “strong left” columns, before dropping rapidly in credibility rapidly before any hit the “Most extreme left” section. On the conservative side, it’s a much more linear trend. WSJ is more reliable and less biased than Fox, which is about the same degree of more reliable and less biased than Breitbart, down to Turning Point USA, down to Rudy Giuliani’s “Common Sense” podcast, down to InfoWars with Alex Jones.

Admittedly, this could be a problem with the sample: it seems like far-right media is more likely to be submitted to Ad Fontes than far-left media, probably because far right media tends to have a bigger footprint. There’s a reason more people have heard of InfoWars than, I don’t know, the Jimmy Dore Show.

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I could talk about this data for days on end, because I’m a news nerd and this is the stuff that floats my boat. I won’t do that, because there’s finite space on this page and finite attention in the reader. A few interesting things to note, however:

With that info dump aside, I present a rare call to action.

Before you ever vote again, go to AdFontesMedia.com. Go find the media bias chart and play with it a little bit. They let you adjust the sliders a few times before you hit a paywall, it’s big fun.

But before you leave the website, take a look around for your favorite news outlets. If they fall below the 24 point reliability score, you should probably get a new go-to source for current events. My condolences to the followers of Cosmopolitan, The Daily Dot, CounterPunch and Bill O'Reilly.

If it falls below 40, try reading an article or two occasionally from something on the other side of the political bias index with a higher reliability rating. For Fox News fans, I’d highly recommend Politico’s newsletters for their character and candor, but U.S. News and World Report is also a solid, no-nonsense publication. For subscribers to the Washington Post or New York Times, I’d suggest the Wall Street Journal, although NewsNation is quite nice as well if you don’t want to pay for another subscription.

If your news source of choice is above the 40-point reliability mark, congratulations on your superior sense of good journalism, also evidenced by your completion of this column. Even so, you should see which side of the bias line it falls on. Then, the next time you see a headline that provokes a reaction, remember that line, close the page, and go find the story’s coverage from a source on the other side. Just to shake things up a little. It’s good for you.

Disclaimer: Ad Fontes Media granted the Southeast Iowa Union temporary access to the “Ad Fontes Media ratings conducted in 2023” bias chart’s premium version, free of charge, after being contacted about permissions to print the chart in our newspaper.

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com