Is SBS News biased?
The rating organisations do not give SBS News one shared verdict in the records we hold. Their published ratings are Ad Fontes Media: Centre; Media Bias/Fact Check: Leans left. We have seen it on 1 published story of ours.
The short answers
Is SBS News biased?
The rating organisations do not give SBS News one shared verdict in the records we hold. Their published ratings are Ad Fontes Media: Centre; Media Bias/Fact Check: Leans left. An outlet rating describes a broad pattern in its output, not every article it publishes.
Is SBS News left or right?
The rating organisations do not give SBS News one shared verdict in the records we hold. Their published ratings are Ad Fontes Media: Centre; Media Bias/Fact Check: Leans left. In the three-way grouping used on story pages, that puts it under Left.
Is SBS News reliable?
The factual-reliability assessments we hold for SBS News are Media Bias/Fact Check: High factuality. These are outlet-level assessments, not a guarantee that every report is correct.
What SBS News has been covering
Our account of each story, written from every outlet that ran it, with SBS News’s own report linked underneath.
Hunter Biden disclosed in a BBC Newsnight interview that his father’s prostate cancer has metastasised to his bones, causing significant pain. The former US president, 83, was later seen in public wearing a dark suit and using a cane. Outlets varied in emphasis, with left-rated reports focusing on the medical details and right-rated digests noting the political context.
SBS News reported it asJoe Biden facing debilitating pain as cancer progresses, son says (opens SBS News in a new tab)
Who says so
2 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.
High factuality
- Media Bias/Fact CheckhighCheck it
Who owns it
- Special Broadcasting Serviceunknowndirect owner
- Australian GovernmentGovernmentparent group
Where it publishes from
- Publishes from
- Artarmon, Willoughby City Council, New South Wales, Australia
- Official site
- sbs.com.au
- Seen publishing on
- sbs.com.au
- 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
- 1
- Reports listed
- 1
- We could read
- 0
- First seen
- 11 August 2026
1 of those reports was paywalled or blocked to us. Our reading of this outlet is built on the 0 we could open, not on everything it published.
We have not seen SBS News cover a story that outlets rated left were largely absent from.
On the one story of ours where at least three of the reports we listed carried a time, another outlet was always ahead of SBS News: its report arrived a median of 28 hours after the earliest one we logged.
Measured 11 August 2026. Last seen in a coverage list 11 August 2026. Ratings pulled 11 August 2026.
Other outlets rated the same way
Publishers carrying the same published leaning as SBS News, also publishing from Australia, 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 SBS News 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.