ProPublica media bias and reliability
AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check place ProPublica as leaning left. We have seen it on 4 published stories of ours.
The short answers
Is ProPublica biased?
AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check place ProPublica as leaning left. An outlet rating describes a broad pattern in its output, not every article it publishes.
Is ProPublica left or right?
AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check place ProPublica as leaning left. In the three-way grouping used on story pages, that puts it under Left.
Is ProPublica reliable?
The factual-reliability assessments we hold for ProPublica are Ad Fontes Media: Very high factuality; Media Bias/Fact Check: High factuality. These are outlet-level assessments, not a guarantee that every report is correct.
What ProPublica has been covering
Our account of each story, written from every outlet that ran it, with ProPublica’s own report linked underneath.
An investigation by ProPublica found that U.S. immigration agents detained at least 506 American citizens between January 2025 and September 2026. The report details cases involving children, individuals documenting raids, and judicial criticism of ICE practices.
ProPublica reported it asMore Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown (opens ProPublica in a new tab)
The FBI sought to launch a pay-to-play investigation into interactions between Senator Susan Collins and a top donor, Martin Kao, but the probe reportedly ended after Donald Trump returned to office. Kao was indicted for illegal campaign contributions.
ProPublica reported it asThe FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way (opens ProPublica in a new tab)
Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding in the Bahamas was funded by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, who is close to Vladimir Putin. Kremlev paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses, including renting a private island. National security experts expressed alarm.
ProPublica reported it asDonald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin (opens ProPublica in a new tab)
A whistleblower has raised alarms about a new U.S. Postal Service system designed to verify mail ballots, alleging it is being developed with inadequate testing and a rushed timeline. The system, intended to comply with a Trump executive order, could lead to the rejection of large numbers of ballots.
ProPublica reported it asNew Mail Voting Rules Moved Forward Despite USPS Officials’ Concerns About Mass Disenfranchisement (opens ProPublica in a new tab)
Who says so
3 organisations have published a rating for this outlet, in their own words. 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.
Very high factuality
Who owns it
- ProPublica, Inc.Independentdirect owner
Where it publishes from
- Publishes from
- New York, New York, United States
- Official site
- propublica.org
- Seen publishing on
- propublica.org, projects.propublica.org
- Access
- Free to read
- Wikipedia
- Entry
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
- 4
- Reports listed
- 4
- We could read
- 1
- First seen
- 25 August 2026
3 of those reports were paywalled or blocked to us. Our reading of this outlet is built on the 1 we could open, not on everything it published.
On 1 of those stories, outlets rated left were largely absent from the coverage and ProPublica ran the story anyway.
Across the 4 stories of ours where at least three of the reports we listed carried a time, another outlet was always ahead of ProPublica: its report arrived a median of 4 hours after the earliest one we logged.
Measured 10 October 2026. Last seen in a coverage list 9 October 2026. Ratings pulled 25 September 2026.
Other outlets rated the same way
Publishers carrying the same published leaning as ProPublica, also publishing from United States, 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 ProPublica 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.