There’s an old “Sesame Street” song called “One of These Things is Not Like the Other,” and it came to mind for me recently when doing my work for Ad Fontes Media. I was on Facebook at the time, reading reactions to our most recent monthly Media Bias Charts® focusing on websites, podcasts and TV/video programs. 

We get a lot of feedback from people about our ratings, especially when they disagree with them. And that’s OK. We love a spirited debate! But there was one common misconception that I saw repeatedly, and I thought it was worth a more complete examination. Here goes: 

Not all content from a particular media company is equally biased or reliable. 

How do I know? Because our analysts have spent hundreds of hours for the past five years analyzing this content. We use content analysis to determine the bias and reliability of particular websites, TV shows, podcasts and other news-like content. That means that our analysts read articles, watch TV programs and listen to podcasts all day every day, and then use our methodology to assign reliability and bias scores to each. 

I’m not going to get into our process in detail (you can read about it on our website if you’re interested). The important thing to know is that each piece of content is rated by a “pod” of three people: one is left-leaning politically, one is right-leaning and one is centrist. Together, they determine the scores of a particular piece of content. This is our way of mitigating our own biases. 

Now, this explanation is best told with pictures, so I’m including several chart images below to illustrate my point. And although our team has analyzed thousands of sources and tens of thousands of individual articles from websites and episodes from podcasts and TV programs, I’m going to focus on two well-known sources in this blog post, for comparison: MSNBC and Fox News.

First of all, it’s important to note that not all Fox News content is the same. Not all MSNBC content is the same. There’s a wide variety of bias and reliability ratings within each network. For example, our analysts have found that the websites of both MSNBC and Fox News present content that is more reliable and less biased overall than their TV programs do.

The MSNBC chart below shows where 27 TV shows and five podcasts fall on the chart, as well as the website overall (I know, the logos overlap so it’s impossible to see them all, but trust me – they are all on there). There’s a big difference between the bias and reliability ratings of two TV programs, “Way Too Early With Jonathan Lemire” and “All In With Chris Hayes,” for example.

This Fox News chart includes 29 TV programs, 18 podcasts and the overall website rating. You can see a huge difference between the ratings of particular programs; for example, the “Fox News Hourly Update” podcast at the top middle of the chart vs. the “Jesse Watters Primetime” TV program at the bottom right.

The point is that not all Fox News content is unreliable and extremely biased to the right. Not all MSNBC content is unreliable and extremely biased to the left.

Perhaps you saw the podcast “Rachel Maddow Presents Ultra” near the middle of the chart and said to yourself (or typed on social media), “Rachel Maddow isn’t unbiased! She’s a left-wing liberal!” You’re correct that “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC does have a strong left bias, but that doesn’t mean the podcast does. 

When our analysts rate content they do exactly that — they rate the content of that particular podcast and ignore any preconceived notions that the podcast will have a liberal bias because Rachel Maddow’s TV show does. If you listen to the “Ultra” podcast, I think you’ll agree that it is very different than her program on MSNBC. (“One of These Things is Not Like the Other” — is that song stuck in your head yet?)

Likewise, take a look at this chart showing content from the Fox News website. Each dot in this image represents a particular online article that our team has rated (more than 760 articles in all!). The weighted average of those scores determines where the Fox News website appears on the chart. 

And wow, Fox News articles are widespread on the chart! Many articles fall in the middle of the chart, indicating a middle or balanced bias. Several articles have a bias rating on the left, and a few others have a very low reliability score that places them at the bottom of the chart. Again, our analysts don’t assign particular bias or reliability ratings just because they know the reputation of Fox News. Each article is rated on its own content, and the scores are assigned accordingly. 

Just for fun, I asked our team to figure out where MSNBC and Fox News would fall on the Media Bias Chart® if ALL of its content were considered. That means all of the articles from their respective websites, and all of the episodes from their respective podcasts and TV programs that have been rated by our team. Here is the result:

You, too, can search various sources and create your own charts by using the Interactive Media Bias Chart® on the website or on the mobile app available for iPhone or Android. It’s free, but there are limits in terms of how many searches you can conduct per day and/or how much source data you can access. To get expanded access, you’ll need a News Nerd subscription. And to access ALL of it, you’ll need a News Nerd Pro subscription. (But not even News Nerd Pros can use our data to recreate the MSNBC/Fox News chart above; that was a special one made just for this blog post!).

I hope this explains our process a bit and helps you to understand what’s behind the placement of particular sources on our Media Bias Chart®. We welcome your comments and feedback! And if you want to get a free biweekly newsletter via email that highlights the work of our team and includes images of the various charts featured each month, sign up here.

Beth Heldebrandt is a Media Research Specialist at Ad Fontes Media. She has more than 30 years of experience in the fields of journalism and public relations, and was an adjunct instructor of journalism for 17 years at Eastern Illinois University. Beth has a B.A. in journalism from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and an M.A. in English from Eastern Illinois University. She’s a mom and grandma, and enjoys traveling, puzzles and reading.