The media bias charts disagree with each other on most outlets

Search for a media bias chart and you will find three: the AllSides Media Bias Chart, the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart, and the ratings published by Media Bias/Fact Check. Each puts news organisations somewhere on a left-to-right scale. Each is widely cited. Almost nobody checks whether they agree with each other.

We hold profiles for the publishers whose reporting turns up in the coverage this site compares, and those profiles carry whichever of the three ratings exist for each one. That makes the comparison a counting exercise rather than an argument. On 5 August 2026, 174 outlets in our records carried a published verdict from two or more of the three.

Narrow it to the outlets all three have assessed and the picture is sharper still. There are 88 of those, and the three organisations reach the same verdict on 29. On the other 59, at least one of them is looking at the same newspaper and seeing something different.

What the disagreements actually look like

This is where the number needs qualifying, because 60% sounds like chaos and it is not. Of the 105 disagreements, 103 are a single step on the scale and stay on one side of centre: one rater says lean-left where another says left, or centre where another says lean-left. That is two people drawing a line in slightly different places, not two people reading different newspapers.

Only 2 disagreements cross the centre — where one organisation places an outlet on the left and another places it on the right. One of those two is CBS News, which almost everyone has heard of: AllSides rates it lean-left, Ad Fontes Media rates it centre, and Media Bias/Fact Check rates it lean-right. All three published their reasoning. All three are looking at the same broadcaster.

“A rating is a considered opinion about a newsroom, published by an organisation with a method. Three of them can be considered, methodical, and different.”

Why they differ

The three are not measuring the same object. AllSides leans on blind bias surveys — ordinary readers of different politics rating content without knowing the source — alongside editorial review. Ad Fontes uses panels of three analysts, one from the left, one from the centre and one from the right, scoring individual articles and averaging upward to the outlet. Media Bias/Fact Check applies a set of criteria — wording, sourcing, story selection, editorial positions — through its own editorial judgement.

Those methods answer subtly different questions. Ad Fontes scores a sample of articles, so a newsroom that runs straight wire copy most days and opinion at the weekend comes out nearer the centre than its opinion pages alone would suggest. AllSides asks how content reads to people who do not know who wrote it. A rater who weighs story selection heavily — what a newsroom chooses not to cover — will place an outlet differently from one who weighs the language inside the stories that ran.

None of that makes any of them wrong. It makes the single number on the chart a summary of a method, and the method is the part that gets lost when the chart is screenshotted onto social media without it.

How to read a bias chart without being misled by it

Treat a rating as evidence about the rater as much as about the outlet. If two organisations put a publisher a step apart, that gap is information: it usually means the outlet is genuinely near a boundary, and a reader who wants certainty from it is asking for something the chart cannot give.

Check the date. Newsrooms change — ownership, editors, business models — and a rating published three years ago describes the newsroom of three years ago. Check whether the rating covers the whole outlet or a section of it; several raters score news and opinion separately, and the difference between the two is often larger than the difference between two outlets.

And do not use a chart to decide what to read. A lean-left rating is not a warning label, and a centre rating is not a certificate. The useful question is not whether a source is biased but what a story looks like when several sources with different leanings report it — which is the whole reason this site exists, and why every outlet page here shows all the ratings we hold rather than picking one.

What we publish, and what we do not

Every bias rating on this site belongs to the organisation that made it, is labelled with that organisation, and links back to their page for it. We do not rate outlets ourselves and we do not average the three into a number of our own, because an average of three different methods measures nothing in particular. Where the raters disagree, the outlet page shows the disagreement rather than resolving it.

What we do measure is our own: for each publisher we have read, how many of the stories we covered they ran, how often they were the first to report something, and how their reports scored on evidence and on hype. Those numbers are ours and are marked as ours.