Can Media Bias Sites Be Trusted?

Is "Left vs. Right" as important as "Journalism vs. Propaganda?"

Dec 11, 2024

The Shot

Yesterday, Republican senator Tom Cotton stopped the Senate from passing the PRESS Act, a bipartisan bill to protect the whistleblower function that is essential to government accountability. Despite over 100 media and press rights organizations calling for the legislation to pass, Cotton trotted out a classic conservative line of attack, saying the bill is "the biggest giveaway to the liberal press in American history." This is absurd. The bill has nothing to do with the “liberal press” in any way. Every American who desires a transparent window into their government, no matter who is in charge, supports this bill.

The Chaser

Powerful figures have spent decades undermining trust in factual sources of information vital to the public interest. Weaponizing the word “liberal” and applying it to the press has been an explicit strategy of conservatives dating back to at least the Nixon administration’s attacks on the “liberal media.”

Never forget, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy…write that on the blackboard 100 times. - Richard Nixon to Henry Kissinger, December 1972

Like Nixon, Rush Limbaugh, and Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump has long set out to destroy trust in journalism in order to replace it with propaganda. Since becoming president in 2016, Trump has called journalists and fact-based newsrooms “fake news” thousands of times.

By making the public doubt factual news, Republican politicians and their representatives in media have succeeded in limiting the consequences they face when they do things like break into the DNC, lie about elections, or attempt a coup. Billionaires have spent gobs of money for the “liberal media” label to be spread by the politicians and media outlets they own.

Combine this well-funded effort with the attacks on our information ecosystem by foreign enemies like Vladimir Putin and what you get is an American public that believes fiction more than fact.

Enter The Arbiters

So with conspiracy theories running rampant and powerful figures telling them everything is fake how can Americans know which newsrooms to trust?

Organizations like Ad Fontes and Allsides have popped up over the last decade claiming to offer a solution to America’s informational woes—an authoritative understanding of our media ecosystem and its biases. To market their product they place newsroom logos on different areas of glossy charts to indicate their perceived prejudices.

Newcomers like Ground News and Straight Arrow News go one step further, attempting to meet a user’s information needs by curating newsfeeds from a variety of sources and adding a bias label to the top of every article.

These sites claim to help expose users to their media consumption blindspots—what’s being said on the “other side.” They confidently market their professed insight into the degree of political bias and level of reliability of thousands of information sources.

Sounds great, right? The need for Americans to understand bias in media and expose themselves to factual information is paramount, especially after an election that was decided in large part based on whether or not voters knew basic facts about society or consumed news at all.

Unfortunately, there are just a couple massive problems with media bias companies. Let’s take a look at a few of them and see if they can truly be relied upon to help us find healthier, fact-based information that provides context and transparency.

No Credibility, No Problem

Allsides entirely ignores whether or not reporting is factual or accurate, which should be the ultimate pursuit of any of these companies.

While Allsides pays a lot of lip service to accuracy…

Journalism is tied to a set of ethical standards and values, including truth and accuracy, fairness and impartiality, and accountability. However, journalism today often strays from objective fact, resulting in biased news.

…and even features the tagline “Don’t be fooled by media bias and misinformation,” the site doesn’t actually help its users determine what is and isn’t misinformation at all. The very top of its media bias chart admits, “Ratings do not reflect accuracy or credibility; they reflect perspective only.”

Ad Fontes does claim to analyze the fact-based credibility of the outlets it rates.

Self Own

Allsides and Ad Fontes downplay the most consequential influence on the quality of our information, media ownership.

Media owners often own other companies whose products and business practices deserve public scrutiny. However, they are able to use their newsrooms to avoid such scrutiny and advance their business agendas on a mass scale. This inherent conflict of interest compromises the integrity of the information the public receives. For instance, a billionaire’s newsrooms won’t conduct investigative journalism into the polluting of a local river by one of his factories. Media owners have enormous power to advance their ideological goals, as well. Facts about the world are withheld from the public because owners want to influence public opinion according to their personal and business needs.

Neither site factors media ownership into their bias evaluations. Allsides does provide some background on ownership, but explicitly states next to this information that “Funding and ownership do not influence bias ratings. We rate the bias of content only.”

Guess it doesn’t matter if the owner is a disinformer or has business dealings that will be influenced by who is president, eh, Allsides?

Ad Fontes posts even less information about who funds the news sources it evaluates and does not factor ownership into its ratings, preferring an approach based solely on the content of articles as they appear online.

Ignoring ownership is a glaring oversight in a day and age when media owners like Elon Musk, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos have all interfered with their information product to push personal business agendas.

Ownership omission is even worse when we consider that many of the outlets on their charts are not traditional newsrooms, but rather ideological Trojan Horses designed to launder ideas like the anti-climate action, anti-worker, and racist beliefs of their owners into the mainstream.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the ways ignoring ownership undermines the credibility of media bias companies.

A Reason For (no action on climate) Change

Reason Magazine receives a bias rating of “Center” from Allsides and “Middle” from Ad Fontes.

Reason Magazine is a product of the Reason Foundation, a libertarian non-profit founded in 1978 that is funded by a ton of right wing billionaires. Among those donors is the fossil fuel extracting Koch Foundation.

Over the years, both the magazine and [Reason] foundation have had numerous ties with the Koch network…Notably, the free market magazine does not have sufficient subscribers to sustain it and has not for years.

So, Reason Magazine cannot survive on subscriptions and is propped up by its fossil fuel backers who have a specific, hidden agenda. The magazine regularly opposes taking any climate action at all.

Everyone has the right to argue against climate change action as much as they want, but when wealthy people with partisan interests prop up propaganda magazines in order to influence public perception, media bias companies shouldn’t be telling users those outlets have a neutral bias.

Real Clear Hidden Agenda

Allsides rates Real Clear Politics as “Center” with “high confidence in this bias rating.”

They must have missed this from The New York Times on 11/17/2020:

…Real Clear Politics and its affiliated websites have taken a rightward, aggressively pro-Trump turn over the last four years as donations to its affiliated nonprofit have soared.

That affiliated non-profit is Real Clear Media which receives millions of dollars from Donors Trust, the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement” which “bankrolls the right’s fight against unions, public schools, and climate scientists.”

…a separate, donor-funded investigative unit within the Real Clear enterprise has been responsible for some of the most audacious work it has published during the Trump presidency. Sometimes these have been stories that most other news outlets, including some that lean conservative, would not touch because the details were unsubstantiated or publication of them would raise ethical concerns.

So Allsides rates a hyper-partisan, right-leaning outlet as “Center.”

At least Ad Fontes more accurately rates Real Clear Politics’ bias as “Strong Right” with a “Mixed" reliability rating. Though, inexplicably, it sits in a position on their chart that is to the right of, and rated less reliable than, Russian propaganda outfit Russia Today (RT).

Side note: It’s just plain weird for Ad Fontes and Allsides to lend known Russian government propaganda like RT any legitimacy whatsoever. There is no clear indication given on the Ad Fontes site that RT is pure propaganda, just a rating of “Skews Right” with “Mixed” reliability. Allsides gives it a legitimizing bias rating of “Lean Right,” but does indicate RT’s propaganda status further down on its profile page.

SAN It Ain’t So

Straight Arrow News (SAN) touts a tagline of “Unbiased. Straight Facts.” It receives a rating of “Middle” from Ad Fontes and "Center” from Allsides. It provides news from across a fairly narrow spectrum of mainstream and right wing outlets. SAN also features its own newsroom anchors who do video reports from a C-SPAN-esque studio.

I found this SAN news anchor report that talks about the Republican effort to strip healthcare for trans children in military families that relies on The Daily Wire as its source. The Daily Wire was founded with seed money from the ultra-conservative, billionaire Wilks brothers in order to spread propaganda and generate culture war BS in service to their personal agenda.

Still, SAN is an Allsides darling, receiving its “Certified Balanced” Award.

Yet, their opinion page is wildly unbalanced. SAN offers “Liberal Opinion” from pundits like law professor Adrienne Lawrence and David Pakman, who relies on fact-based information sources like CNN, The Hill, and The New York Times to make his points.

The “Conservative Opinion” side, at the time of this writing, features three pieces by a Claremont Institute Fellow, three pieces by Center for Urban Renewal and Education founder Star Parker, and one piece by a Senior Fellow from the Koch created American Enterprise Institute.

The Claremont Institute is a far right, billionaire funded think tank with members like extremist Jack Posobiec. Posobiec can be seen below at a recent CPAC convention standing beside Steve Bannon while promising to destroy democracy.

The Center for Urban Renewal and Education is a far right, billionaire funded think tank advocating for discrimination and spreading wild eugenicist conspiracy theories.

SAN is owned by right wing billionaire Joe Ricketts. In 2012, Rickett's planned a racist advertising campaign to defeat Obama.

…entitled "The Defeat of Barrack Hussein Obama," which planned to recycle the Obama-Reverand Jeremiah Wright conspiracy. The 10 million dollar ad campaign would have began airing prior to the Democratic National Convention. The plan for the add campaign was quoted as wanting to hire, "an extremely literate African-American," as spokesman and have that individual claim Mr. Obama fooled the nation by presenting himself as a "metro-sexual, black Abe Lincoln."^[5]

Regardless of your political affiliation, knowing these facts about their right wing Opinion writers and its racist owner, would you rate the bias of SAN to be neutral?

Is Left vs. Right…Right?

These media bias sites have a major blindspot. They completely fail to account for the billionaires who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last 60 years to warp our media ecosystem. Like Marty McFly in a DeLorean, they have burst onto the scene of our bewildering, post-truth America without understanding the dynamics at play in the time and space at which they’ve arrived.

The billionaire-funded idea that fact-based journalism equates to a “liberal bias” bleeds confusingly into the evaluations made by the media bias sites and ruins their ability to provide utility to the user.

Though billionaires succeeded in making it fashionable to describe all mainstream media as “liberal” it is much more accurate to understand the bias of large, profit-seeking mainstream media companies through the lens of corporatism. Corporations are in the business of profit and the ideology of corporate newsrooms is geared towards a corporate agenda of generating wealth and maintaining the status quo, not progressive politics.

The New York Times Company is a $7 billion dollar corporation. Their newspaper does mostly credible, fact-based reporting. When they get a story wrong, they correct it. But the Times also helped lie our nation into the disastrous Iraq War by towing the line of a conservative administration. Its Opinion section regularly features the Claremont types mentioned above. And good luck getting the Grey Lady to robustly cover the rising labor movement in this country. More than anything else, it’s a corporate paper for wealthy people.

Yet, media bias sites rate The New York Times as pretty far left. Why? Because it has the hippie gall to accurately report on climate science? Or because billionaires and their politicians, who hate all government regulation, decided long ago that it was their worst nightmare to live in a country where newsrooms with the temerity to even occasionally report on the public benefits of government regulation might be considered legitimate?

Never forget, the press is the enemy, the press is the enemy…write that on the blackboard 100 times. - Richard Nixon to Henry Kissinger, December 1972

This “Left” label must be attributed to the successful effort to fabricate the idea of a liberal mainstream media, when what we really have is a corporate mainstream media.1 Media bias sites do not account for these realities at all.

CNN wasn’t started by Ted Turner to get the “liberal” message out. It was started by a businessman to make money by sensationalizing the news 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The billionaire currently pulling the strings at CNN is a big fan of Fox News and wants to steer the channel in that direction. Media bias sites don’t account for that, either.

Journalism, as practiced at excellent non-profit newsrooms like Pro Publica, seeks the truth of a matter as it accords with facts, reporting on issues with context and transparency. Corporate newsrooms frame stories and omit issues according to their business agendas, but for the most part hire journalists committed to fact-based reporting. Propaganda seeks to persuade regardless of fact. Media bias sites ignore these dynamics and apply a frame of “left vs. right” to newsrooms when a “journalism vs. propaganda” frame would be far more accurate and useful.

Right wing media—created by billionaires for the purpose of advancing right wing ideology—is propaganda. Fox News was started by Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch based on a plan to put “the GOP on TV news.” They may report some things accurately, but they have a history of lying to their viewers, even about the results of a presidential election, in service to a political agenda. When they get a story wrong, they don’t correct it. That’s not journalism, that’s propaganda.

Right wing media quite obviously operate according to a pro-billionaire, pro-culture war agenda. To distract from their nakedly ideological propaganda campaign, right wing pundits lie and say that mainstream media, full of actual journalists who care about reporting facts, are engaged in a nakedly ideological propaganda campaign. Media bias sites fall for it.

Forget “Certified Balanced” awards. We need “Certified Journalism In The Public Interest” awards. [You can find mostly non-profit and independent local journalism newsrooms operating in the public interest in a searchable directory here. From Media and Democracy Project. Full disclosure, I am a MAD co-founder.]

A Bias Towards Truth and Democracy

I cannot recommend media bias sites so long as they continue to keep America’s true media bias hidden.

As many of these sites admit, every news organization is biased. There’s no escaping it. There is also no escaping that there are journalists and propagandists on all sides of political debate in this country.

However, it is a well-documented phenomenon that over the last 60 years there has been a concerted, outrageously well-funded effort by the American right wing to dominate the public discourse with propaganda outlets masquerading as newsrooms. There is no such equivalent on the American left.

Despite being well-documented, too few Americans are aware of these dynamics. Only by seeing the real “hidden media bias,” as Allsides, ironically enough, puts it, that “misleads, manipulates and divides us” can we truly begin to reform our media ecosystem in the public interest.

In the meantime, the best we can do is up our media literacy game. Public Enlightenment is biased towards truth (as it accords with facts) and democracy. Look for news outlets that make those same priorities clear. Let’s get stronger in our media literacy so that we can all move ahead with a more holistic understanding of the information environment.

Research your sources of news. When I google “Is Newsweek to the right or to the left?” I initially get a bunch of results from media bias sites. But at the bottom of the first page of results, I’m able to learn “How Newsweek Has Gone Down the Far-Right Rabbit Hole.” It’s written by Justin Baragona. Maybe you should follow him on Bluesky and decide over time if he’s trustworthy and do the same with other media reporters (hint: that’s one of the ways I do it).

Pay attention to a newsroom’s about section. Ask yourself how forthcoming they are about funding. Look up the details of who owns your media.

Read media critics like Margaret Sullivan, Mark Jacob, Dan Froomkin, and Jay Rosen.

Consult watchdog sites like DeSmog, Source Watch, and American Oversight. Be warned that Influence Watch is the billionaire answer to Source Watch. They literally have a think tank or influence organization for everything.

And don’t get me wrong. It’s okay to be a billionaire. That’s your American right. It’s just that billionaires are usually working against the best interests of everyone else reading this sentence.

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With love,
Brian

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