Ad Fontes Media Releases Simple Media Bias Chart® of TV/Video Shows
Author:
Date:
09/28/2026
Our third and final simple Media Bias Chart® for 2026 focuses on TV/video sources. In all, our team has rated 915 TV and video shows for their bias and reliability. This chart contains 25 of them (find a list of those 25 here).
This “simple” chart includes fewer but larger source logos because many of you have told us that our charts are too crowded and the logos are too small, making them difficult to read. We’ve released two simple charts already this month, one focusing on web/print sources and one on podcasts. You can find those here.
You can download a free, licensed version of this simple, magnified Media Bias Chart® for TV/video sources here!
For this simplified version of the chart, we included the overall scores for some TV news networks. The overall network scores are determined by a weighted average of all the content from that network that we’ve rated. You’ll find these seven networks on the simple chart:
- Al Jazeera TV Network
- CNN TV Network
- Fox News Channel TV Network
- MS NOW TV Network (MSNBC)
- NBC News TV Network
- Newsmax TV Network
- NewsNation TV Network
The rest of the chart is filled with individual TV and video programs that fall across the bias and reliability spectrum. Some are from longtime network and cable channels; others are on platforms such as YouTube. Like all static chart images, we have to choose sources that fall in different areas of the chart, because we can’t put logos on top of each other.
That’s why on this chart you’ll find two of the three network nightly news shows — ABC: World News Tonight with David Muir and CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil — but you won’t find NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas because it falls in the same location as the CBS show.
In order to make the logos as large and as readable as possible, we have magnified a portion of the chart and removed the sections around the edges. That means that we have omitted any sources that fall entirely within the “Most Extreme” right and left bias categories and the “Contains Inaccurate/Fabricated Info” reliability category.
Here’s a list of the sources that fall within the green box on this chart. Our analyst team has found that these sources are generally reliable and minimally biased:
- ABC: World News Tonight with David Muir
- CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil
- CNN TV Network
- CNN: Smerconish
- Fox News: Special Report w/ Bret Baier
- NBC News TV Network
- NewsNation TV Network
- NewsNation: Morning in America
We know there are hundreds of other TV and video shows that you might be interested in. That’s why we created an Interactive Media Bias Chart® and a free app for Android and iPhone that allows you to search for sources by name. Both are free (with daily search limits), but for now, the free interactive chart allows you to search for only 250 of our top sources. But soon we’ll be debuting our newest version of the interactive chart, and it allows everyone to search for ANY source we’ve rated!
Don’t miss upcoming announcements about the release of our new-and-improved Interactive Media Bias Chart®! Sign up for our email list!
Beth Heldebrandt is Director of Communications 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.
