Our team passed a milestone this month by fully rating our 900th podcast! That’s quite an accomplishment for our analysts, who have spent thousands of hours over the past five years listening to podcasts and rating them for their bias and reliability. Each episode is rated by three human analysts (one left, one right, and one center) who listen to the episode together and then rate together, as well.

What does it mean for a show to be “fully rated”? Our methodology requires that we analyze a certain amount of content from a source over a period of time before that source is added to the Media Bias Chart®. For podcasts, we must rate a minimum of three complete episodes of the show before we consider it to be fully rated. We get a larger sample if we detect a possible wide variation in bias or reliability in our initial sample. The top most popular podcasts regularly get new episodes rated to update their sample, with a few of the most famous podcasts getting dozens of episode ratings.

We rate both audio and video podcasts every week, and we’ve rated some content from 1,000 shows (that’s more than 3,700 episodes!). Of those 1,000, we’ve fully rated 900 of them.

We do our best to rate a representative sample from each show, and a weighted average of the episode scores determines where the podcast falls on the chart. But the content of various podcasts can sometimes change over time, so if you feel that we should update our ratings on a particular show, let us know.

The June edition of the Podcast/Audio Media Bias Chart® includes 45 shows. Sources in the green box of the chart have been found by our team to consistently provide minimally biased, fact-based information.

Eleven podcasts fall within the green box on the June Media Bias Chart®:

• CBC News: The World This Hour
• CNN One Thing
• Front Burner
• National Affairs Podcast
• NPR News Now
• NYT: Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
• Political Gabfest
• Start Here
• The Focus Group with Sarah Longwell
• The McCarthy Report
• The Trade Guys

More podcasts fall within the green box, and we’ll feature those on future charts.

Eight podcasts are included on the chart this month for the first time:

• CNN One Thing
• The Chris Stigall Show
• The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich
• The Focus Group with Sarah Longwell
• The Liberal Patriot with Ruy Teixeira
• The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
• Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory
• WSJ: All Things with Kim Strassel

We choose only a few dozen podcasts to include on each month’s static Media Bias Chart® because it’s impossible to show all of them in a single image. A list of the 45 sources on this chart can be found here. In order to make the logos as large and readable as possible, we’ve magnified a portion of the chart and removed the edges that contain no sources.

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