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Mandatory media bias and reliability

Ad Fontes Media places Mandatory in the centre. We have seen it on 99 published stories of ours.

CentreMixed factuality

The short answers

Is Mandatory biased?

Ad Fontes Media places Mandatory in the centre. An outlet rating describes a broad pattern in its output, not every article it publishes.

Is Mandatory left or right?

Ad Fontes Media places Mandatory in the centre. In the three-way grouping used on story pages, that puts it under Centre.

Is Mandatory reliable?

The factual-reliability assessments we hold for Mandatory are Ad Fontes Media: Mixed factuality. These are outlet-level assessments, not a guarantee that every report is correct.

What Mandatory has been covering

Our account of each story, written from every outlet that ran it, with Mandatory’s own report linked underneath.

Who says so

One organisation has published a rating for this outlet. Where they disagree, the disagreement is the useful part and it is left standing.

How reliably it reports fact

A rating of the newsroom in general, by others, and a different thing from the Trust score we publish on each story, which judges one piece of reporting.

Mixed factuality

Who owns it

We hold no ownership record for Mandatory.

Where it publishes from

Official site
mandatory.com
Seen publishing on
mandatory.com
Access
Free to read

What we have seen ourselves

Counted across the stories this site has published, which is the only denominator a reader can check: every one of them has a page, and every page lists the reports it was written from.

Stories
99
Reports listed
102
We could read
12
First seen
5 August 2026

90 of those reports were paywalled or blocked to us. Our reading of this outlet is built on the 12 we could open, not on everything it published.

A blindspot is measured against one side of the spectrum. Mandatory is rated centre, so there is no side for it to be counted against and we publish no figure here.

Across the 99 stories of ours where at least three of the reports we listed carried a time, another outlet was always ahead of Mandatory: its report arrived a median of 28 hours after the earliest one we logged.

Measured 7 November 2026. Last seen in a coverage list 2 November 2026. Ratings pulled 9 October 2026.

Other outlets rated the same way

Publishers carrying the same published leaning as Mandatory, ordered by how often we have seen them on a story. Sharing a rating is not the same as being alike.

Think this page is wrong?

The leanings above are published by AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check, and we republish them rather than make them. If you think one is misapplied, the strongest place to say so is with the organisation that made it, and every verdict here links to their page.

What we are responsible for is everything else: the ownership chain, where Mandatory publishes from, which of our stories we have listed it on, and whether we have the right publisher at all. Tell us what is wrong and an editor reads it.

Report something wrong on this page

Anything we correct is written up in the public corrections log. We do not publish reader votes as a rating, because an unattributed rating is the thing this site exists to argue against.

Every rating on this page is a named third party’s published work, republished with its author and, where one exists, a link to it. Our own coverage record is the section we measure ourselves. Neither is a judgement of any individual report: those are scored story by story, and the reasoning is on our methodology page.

Mandatory media bias and reliability | MediaBias News