The Media Bias Chart: What It Is, Why It Exists, and Why It Still Sparks Arguments
There’s a moment that many people who follow politics know well. You’re scrolling through your phone. Someone you care about has shared an article. You read the headline and your first thought is: where on earth did that come from? Maybe you argue about it. Maybe you quietly lose a little faith in that person. Maybe you lose a little faith in the news itself.
That moment is exactly what the Media Bias Chart was made to address. And to be honest, the tale of how it came to be is rather amazing.
Key Facts
| Fact | Detail |
| Full name | The Media Bias Chart® |
| Created by | Vanessa Otero, a patent attorney from Denver, Colorado |
| First published | Fall 2016, on her personal blog All Generalizations Are False |
| Went viral | December 2016 on Imgur; 20,000+ shares within hours |
| Organization founded | Ad Fontes Media, February 2018 |
| Name meaning | “Ad Fontes” is Latin for “to the source” |
| What it measures | Two things: political bias (left to right) and reliability (fact-based to false) |
| How it’s built | Teams of analysts — left, right, and center — rate actual articles together |
| Analysts required | Over 40 trained analysts, each doing 30+ hours of initial training |
| Sources rated | Over 2,000 news outlets, podcasts, TV shows, and radio programs |
| How often updated | Flagship chart twice a year; interactive version updated daily |
| Revenue model | Free basic chart; paid interactive tools for educators and advertisers |
| Major funding | $4.2 million raised in 2023 |
| Recent controversy | FTC investigation launched in June 2025 |
A Lawyer Gets Frustrated on Facebook
Picture the fall of 2016. The U.S. presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was building toward its noisy, exhausting peak. And Vanessa Otero, a patent attorney in Denver who loved both logic and the news, was watching her Facebook feed turn into something ugly.
People she liked were posting articles at each other. Not to inform — to win. And the articles were coming from places that weren’t exactly household names, sources that seemed designed more to provoke anger than to explain anything. Otero noticed that friends were losing friendships over it. She had been trying to have a genuine conversation with a conservative buddy by sharing personal tales, but she gradually witnessed that friendship deteriorate as the information they both saw became more radical.
She decided to do something about it. As a patent attorney, her whole professional life was about analyzing texts carefully and explaining complicated things visually. So she sat down and spent a few weeks reading outlets she didn’t normally visit, watching news shows across the political spectrum, and manually rating what she found.
The result was a two-dimensional chart. She posted it on her blog in October 2016. Within hours of sharing it on Facebook, it had 20,000 shares. By December, after it spread to the image-sharing site Imgur, it had millions of views worldwide. Otero had touched something that a lot of people were quietly desperate for: a way to make sense of the news ecosystem they were drowning in.
She had no idea, she later said, that it would turn into anything more than a hobby project. But here we are.
See also “Do You Tip Uber Drivers? The Honest, Human Answer“
How the Chart Actually Works
The chart looks deceptively simple. It’s a wide grid, almost shaped like an upside-down U, with news sources scattered across it like stars on a map.
The horizontal axis is about political lean — from far left on one end to far right on the other, with a center column in the middle. The vertical axis is about reliability and quality — from original, fact-based reporting at the top, down through analysis and opinion, all the way to “contains inaccurate or fabricated information” near the bottom.
That shape the sources make — that inverted U — is actually meaningful. Sources near the center tend to cluster toward the top. The lower sources tend to sink as you move further to the left or right. The chart is visually suggesting something that research backs up: extreme political bias tends to come paired with lower accuracy.
When Otero first made the chart, she rated everything herself. That was always going to be a problem, because one person’s bias would leak into every placement. So as the project grew, she built a system of what she calls “pods” — groups of three analysts, always one who leans left, one who leans right, and one who sits in the middle. They rate the same articles together. When they disagree strongly, they discuss it and, sometimes, pass the article to another pod.
Each article gets scored on factors like whether it’s expressed as fact or opinion, whether its implicit claims are actually true, how the headline is framed, what the lead sentence implies. The scores from each analyst are averaged, and over time, those averages build up a source’s overall position on the chart.
The analysts themselves all hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Most have graduate degrees. They go through 30 hours of training before they start, and another 40 hours of ongoing training every year.
What Makes It Different From Other Tools
The Media Bias Chart isn’t the only tool of its kind, and it’s worth knowing the others.
AllSides rates outlets on a simple five-point scale: Left, Lean Left, Center, Lean Right, Right. They use a mix of editorial review and what they call “blind surveys” — where participants rate articles without knowing which outlet published them. AllSides covers more than 1,400 sources and is free to use. One big difference: AllSides doesn’t rate accuracy at all, only political lean. They’ve said they don’t want to be a “Ministry of Truth.”
Ground News doesn’t do its own ratings. Instead, it averages the scores from Ad Fontes, AllSides, and a site called Media Bias/Fact Check, then shows you those combined scores alongside the actual headlines. It’s more of an aggregator than a rater.
Media Bias/Fact Check is a sprawling site that covers thousands of sources and includes factuality scores, but its methodology is less transparent and has drawn criticism from researchers.
Each tool has a slightly different philosophy. Ad Fontes is probably the most granular and the most focused on the actual text of articles rather than an outlet’s overall reputation. It also uniquely combines both axes — bias and reliability — in a single visual.
What the Chart Has Revealed Over Time
When you look at where sources land on the chart, a few things stand out.
Reuters and the Associated Press have consistently sat near the top center — rated as highly reliable and roughly politically neutral. The Wall Street Journal’s news reporting (not its opinion section) also ranks very high for accuracy, even though it leans slightly right editorially. Public broadcasters like NPR and BBC sit in a similar zone.
Sources at the outer edges, both left and far right, tend to sit much lower on the reliability scale. InfoWars, for example, was categorized as “nonsense damaging to public discourse.” Its founder Alex Jones called the chart evidence of “dying dinosaur media’s extreme liberal bias” — and then InfoWars published their own chart, which rated the Associated Press as representing “tyranny.” Journalists widely mocked it.
That reaction from InfoWars is actually something Otero has pointed to as a kind of validation. She often says that when people across the whole political spectrum are frustrated with where their favorite source lands, that’s a sign the methodology is doing something right.”A lot of people on the left call us neoliberal shills,” she told us, “and then a bunch of people on the right say we’re leftists ourselves.”
The Benefits: Why People Love This Thing
There’s a reason the chart went viral and kept going. It gave people a shared visual language for something that had felt impossible to discuss.
Before the chart existed, saying “that source is biased” was just an opinion. Someone else could say the opposite. There was no common framework. The chart — even imperfect — gave people something to point to. It created a starting point.
Teachers have been some of its most passionate adopters. The chart has found its way into civics classrooms, history classes, journalism programs, and library guides at universities including Harvard, Elon, and the University of North Carolina. Middle school teachers use it. So do professors. It’s been licensed for use in academic textbooks, which initially shocked Otero.
For students who’ve grown up being told that all opinions are equally valid, the chart offers a gentle push back: no, actually, some sources are more reliable than others, and here’s a way to see that.
Advertisers have also become major clients. Companies like Meta, LinkedIn, and Comscore have used Ad Fontes data to make decisions about where to place their ads — specifically, which outlets they’re comfortable being associated with. The business model of keeping news organizations accountable partly flows through brands who don’t want their ads running next to misinformation.
The Challenges: Why People Are Also Frustrated By It
Here’s the honest part. The chart is genuinely useful, but it has real limitations, and being clear about those matters.
It can’t be fully objective. Ad Fontes acknowledges this plainly on their own website: “Everyone and everything is biased.” Vanessa Otero has openly said she has left-of-center political views. She has tried to design the methodology to correct for that — through diverse analyst teams, averaging, and discussion — but the fact remains that the methodology itself was designed by a person with a point of view.
The chart has also consistently drawn criticism that it rates right-leaning outlets as less accurate than left-leaning ones. Some of this may reflect genuine differences in accuracy across the political spectrum. Some of it may reflect blind spots in the methodology. It’s probably both.
It simplifies enormously. A single publication, such as the New York Times, publishes hundreds of items every week, ranging from opinion pieces to cultural evaluations to breaking news. Putting one dot on a chart to represent all of that strips away enormous variation. The chart rates sampled content, not every article ever published.
Researchers have pointed out that measuring media bias at all is deeply tricky. A Texas Tech University study acknowledged the chart offers a useful framework but noted that no tool can objectively measure bias — because “objectivity” in journalism is itself contested. Academic librarians at William & Mary and the Missouri Legislative Library published a critique arguing the chart risks becoming a crutch, replacing genuine critical thinking rather than building it.
Otero responded directly to that critique. She agreed that the chart alone isn’t enough. But she argued it’s especially useful for people who will never sit down with an academic librarian — the person scrolling Facebook at 11pm who just needs a fast, honest signal about where a link is coming from.
Common Misconceptions Worth Clearing Up
A few things people often get wrong about the chart:
Some people assume the chart is made by a big media company with an agenda. It isn’t. It started as one person’s personal blog project and grew slowly through crowdfunding and word of mouth. The founder took a leap and left her law career to work on it full time.
Some people think that a source being placed on the “left” side of the chart means the chart itself is politically motivated. That’s a circular argument. If a source actually publishes more opinion than fact and tilts left, it should sit left and lower. The placement reflects the content.
Some people think the chart is final or authoritative. It isn’t. The creators are pretty clear that it’s a useful starting point, not the last word. They frequently update their sources, and as outlets shift, so do the ratings.
And some people assume that center placement means a source is perfect. It doesn’t. A centrist source can still miss stories, publish errors, or have blind spots. Being near the middle just means the balance of what was sampled showed relatively low bias and relatively high accuracy.
The Bigger Picture: What’s Really at Stake
The chart exists because something real is happening to how people get their information.
Gallup has tracked a steady, long-term decline in Americans’ trust in the media. When people stop trusting a shared set of sources, they drift toward sources that simply confirm what they already believe. Those filter bubbles grow thicker. Political conversation across the ideological divide becomes harder, because people aren’t working from the same set of facts.
Studies have shown that people who rely on heavily partisan media are more likely to believe things that are factually wrong. During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers found that people who consumed a wider range of sources were better at critically evaluating health information. People who relied on just one or two highly partisan sources were more likely to absorb false claims without questioning them.
The chart can’t fix polarization. But it can give someone a moment of pause. You see that your favorite source sits pretty far left or pretty far right. You wonder what you might be missing. Maybe you look at something different for a week. That’s not nothing.
The Political and Legal Storm It Walked Into
In June 2025, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sent what’s known as a Civil Investigative Demand — basically a pre-litigation subpoena — to Ad Fontes Media and more than a dozen other organizations. The FTC, under its chair appointed by the Trump administration, is investigating whether media rating companies colluded to steer advertising dollars away from conservative outlets.
Otero called the demands “excessive” and “overzealous,” saying the FTC was asking for virtually every piece of information pertaining to their business since it started. She made clear that Ad Fontes would cooperate. She also made clear she believes their work is both lawful and constitutionally protected.
The ACLU filed a brief in a related case, arguing that these FTC investigations amount to government pressure to silence organizations that rate conservative media unfavorably — a First Amendment concern.
This controversy is worth sitting with. It illustrates something important: the moment you try to measure something as politically charged as media bias, you become part of the political story yourself. The chart was created to stand outside the partisan fray. And now it’s standing squarely in the middle of one.
Where This Is All Heading
The chart has grown remarkably since 2016. It now covers more than 2,000 sources. It includes podcasts, TV shows, radio programs, and online outlets. It has expanded into Spanish-language media. It uses a hybrid of human analysts and AI to rate new content daily.
The bigger question is what kind of information ecosystem we’ll have in the years ahead. More Substacks, more YouTube channels, more podcasts, fewer newsrooms with full-time reporters. More content, but not necessarily more journalism. The chart was built to help people navigate an already complicated media world. That world is getting more complicated, not less.
There’s something genuinely hopeful about the idea that one person got frustrated watching her friends argue on Facebook and decided to do something constructive about it. Whether or not you agree with every placement on the chart, that impulse — to bring rigor and care to a messy problem instead of just yelling about it — seems like exactly the right response to this moment.
FAQs
1. Is the Media Bias Chart free to use?
The website of Ad Fontes Media offers the basic flagship chart for free download. There is also an interactive version with more detail that requires a paid subscription. Educational and business tiers are available at different price points.
2. How often does the chart get updated?
The printed flagship chart is updated twice a year. The interactive web version and app are updated on an ongoing basis, with the most popular sources updated more frequently. Ad Fontes now also uses AI alongside human analysts to rate new content daily for its business customers.
3. Who are the analysts rating the content?
Ad Fontes has over 40 trained analysts who represent a range of political views — left, center, and right. Most have doctorate degrees, and all have at least a bachelor’s degree. They go through extensive training before rating anything and continue ongoing training throughout the year.
4. Does the chart cover non-American news sources?
The chart has historically focused on U.S. media. In recent years, Ad Fontes has begun expanding into Spanish-language publications, and some international outlets like BBC and Reuters appear on the chart as well.
5. What does it mean if a source sits in the “center”?
It means that, based on sampled articles, the source showed relatively low political lean and relatively high factual reliability. It doesn’t mean the source is perfect or never makes mistakes. It just means the balance of what was rated showed less bias.
6. Why do some people claim the chart is biased against conservative media?
This criticism comes partly from the fact that several well-known right-leaning outlets score lower on the reliability axis. Some critics argue this reflects the chart’s own political bias. Others argue it reflects genuine differences in how much misinformation different types of outlets publish. The debate is ongoing, and Ad Fontes publicly acknowledges their methodology is imperfect.
7. How is Ad Fontes different from AllSides?
Ad Fontes uses a two-axis chart to measure both political bias and dependability. AllSides rates only political lean (left, lean left, center, lean right, right) and does not assess accuracy. AllSides covers more sources. Ad Fontes uses trained analyst panels; AllSides uses a mix of blind surveys, community ratings, and editorial review.
8. Can a news source’s rating change over time?
Yes. Ad Fontes updates source ratings as new articles are published and analyzed. If an outlet changes its editorial approach — for better or worse — its position on the chart can shift. Some sources have moved over the years.
9. How does the chart handle opinion vs. news sections of the same outlet?
Ad Fontes tries to rate sources based on a mix of the content they actually publish. An outlet like the Wall Street Journal, whose opinion section is very conservative, will still be placed based on the full range of content sampled, including its news reporting.
10. Is there evidence the chart actually changes people’s news behavior?
Some classroom research suggests that exposure to tools like the Media Bias Chart improves students’ ability to evaluate sources. Individual behavioral change at scale is harder to measure. The chart can give someone a moment of doubt about a source they’ve been trusting uncritically, but whether that leads to lasting change depends on the person.
11. What happened with the FTC investigation in 2025?
In June 2025, the FTC sent Civil Investigative Demands to Ad Fontes and other media rating companies, investigating whether they colluded to steer advertising away from conservative outlets. Ad Fontes said it would cooperate while calling the demands excessive. As of mid-2026, the investigation is ongoing and has become part of a broader legal and political fight over media regulation and free speech.
12. What types of media does the chart cover beyond written news?
Starting with version 8.0 in 2021, the chart expanded to include podcasts and TV shows. Radio programs and magazines have also been added. The chart has grown significantly beyond its original focus on online news articles.
13. Who funds Ad Fontes Media?
Ad Fontes is a public benefit corporation funded through a mix of subscriber revenue, business licensing, advertiser services, and outside investment. It raised $4.2 million in a funding round in 2023. It has also used crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and WeFunder in the past.
14. Is the chart used in schools?
Yes, widely. Teachers across the U.S. use the chart in civics, history, journalism, and current events classes. University libraries at institutions including Harvard, Elon, Nova Southeastern, and the University of North Carolina Charlotte reference it in their media literacy guides. Ad Fontes offers dedicated classroom subscription tiers with lesson plans for educators.
15. What are the best alternative tools to the Media Bias Chart?
The most-cited alternatives are AllSides (for free left/center/right bias labels), Media Bias/Fact Check (for a broad database of sources with factuality ratings), and Ground News (which aggregates ratings from all three of those sources in an app format). Based on journalistic standards, NewsGuard provides credibility rankings ranging from 0 to 100. Using more than one tool together gives a more complete picture than relying on any single chart.
Empowering curious minds to explore, learn, and think deeper with Fact Aura.
