Is SF Gate biased?
The rating organisations do not give SF Gate one shared verdict in the records we hold. Their published ratings are AllSides: Leans left; Ad Fontes Media: Centre; Media Bias/Fact Check: Leans left. We have seen it on 2 published stories of ours.
The short answers
Is SF Gate biased?
The rating organisations do not give SF Gate one shared verdict in the records we hold. Their published ratings are AllSides: Leans left; 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 SF Gate left or right?
The rating organisations do not give SF Gate one shared verdict in the records we hold. Their published ratings are AllSides: Leans left; 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 SF Gate reliable?
The factual-reliability assessments we hold for SF Gate 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.
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
- Hearst CommunicationsMedia Conglomeratedirect owner
Where it publishes from
- Publishes from
- San Francisco, San Francisco County, California, United States
- Official site
- sfgate.com
- Seen publishing on
- sfgate.com
- 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
- 2
- Reports listed
- 2
- We could read
- 0
- First seen
- 4 August 2026
2 of those reports were 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 SF Gate cover a story that outlets rated left were largely absent from.
Across the 2 stories of ours where at least three of the reports we listed carried a time, we logged no report earlier than SF Gate’s on every one of them. Its report was the first we hold on every one.
Measured 6 August 2026. Last seen in a coverage list 6 August 2026. Ratings pulled 6 August 2026.
Stories we have seen it on
- SF GateLeans leftVery high factualityUnusually intense haboob dust storms strike Phoenix twice this week (opens SF Gate in a new tab)
San Francisco, San Francisco County, California, United StatesOwner: Hearst CommunicationsCarried from Associated Press News
Our report: Phoenix hit by two Category 5 haboob dust storms in three days
- SF GateLeans leftVery high factualityA developer is asking neighbors to buy in and own part of a north Minneapolis mall (opens SF Gate in a new tab)
San Francisco, San Francisco County, California, United States
Our report: Chicago Trend buys Minneapolis strip mall to build local wealth
Other outlets rated the same way
Publishers carrying the same published leaning as SF Gate, 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.
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.