We’ve gotten several comments over the years about the placement of the C-SPAN Live Stream at the top middle of the chart. It’s one of our highest-rated sources from all media types (websites, podcasts/audio, TV/video). Why is this?

C-SPAN Live Stream provides live footage from the floors of the U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, and other proceedings related to public policy. There’s no editing of the content, no commentary and analysis, just a live look at congressional activity, as if the viewers were in the room watching.

Highly fact-based content gets very high reliability scores (y axis of the chart), and you can’t get more fact-based than clearly showcasing what is happening at a primary source, as C-SPAN Live Stream does. But other types of content (which can be very different in format) also rate very highly for reliability. Different types of content (e.g., investigative reporting, documentaries) can achieve similar scores on the chart for different reasons, as we’ll explain further below.

The least-biased coverage falls in the left-right middle of the chart (x axis). Bias typically creeps into news content because of decisions made by those presenting the information (the photos/graphics included, the way the information is written/spoken, analyzing the information or sharing their opinions about it). None of that occurs with a live stream.

Of course, most people don’t have the time or aren’t willing to watch hours of proceedings from the U.S. Capitol. They rely on journalists and others to report on what happened, and examining how that information is presented is the foundation of our work at Ad Fontes Media. We analyze the content of various sources of news to look for evidence of bias, instances of opinion/analysis vs. verifiable facts, misleading or false information, and more. (Look up your favorite show on the Interactive Media Bias Chart® to make sure you can trust it to provide fact-based and balanced information!)

Just below C-SPAN Live Stream on the May Media Bias Chart® for TV/Video released today, you’ll see a documentary that’s making its debut on the chart. HBO: Surveilled examines commercial spyware used by governments and the ethics of cyberespionage. Like C-SPAN Live Stream, our analysts gave the HBO film a bias score of “middle/balanced” and a reliability score of “thorough fact reporting or fact-dense analysis.” (Read about how our ratings of documentaries are different than ratings of other TV/video content here.)

Other shows appearing near the top middle of this month’s TV/video chart are the national NBC News NOW program, Stay Tuned Now with Gadi Schwartz, and a local news show, WKRN News 2 Nashville: News 2 at 6 p.m. These TV news programs are different than the C-SPAN Live Stream and the HBO documentary (which featured investigative reporting on a single topic) because they include the work of journalists reporting on various topics in the news that day. They fit what many would consider the traditional definition of “news media.”

As you can see, different kinds of information sources can land in the top middle of the Media Bias Chart® for a variety of reasons, but all have been rated by our analyst team to be minimally biased and highly reliable to provide verifiable, fact-based information, according to our methodology.

In addition to C-SPAN Live Stream, the HBO: Surveilled documentary, and the two TV news programs, nine shows appear in the green box of the May Media Bias Chart® for TV/Video. Remember: Sources recommended by our team fall within the green box. (More TV/video sources fall within the green box, and we’ll feature those on charts in the future.)

• Channel 4: Unreported World
• CNBC TV Network
• CNN: State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash
• EWTN: EWTN News Nightly
• Fox News: Fox News Live
• Merit Street Media: The News on Merit TV: Morning Edition
• NBC: Sunday Today With Willie Geist
• NewsNation: NewsNation Prime with Natasha Zouves
• Scripps News: Weekend

The 50 sources on the May chart are only a sample of the more than 740 TV/video sources that our team has fully rated. It’s impossible to show hundreds of logos in one image — they overlap each other, and the result is a completely unreadable chart — so we choose a sample to feature each month. In order to make the logos as large and readable as possible, we have magnified a portion of the chart and removed portions around the edges that contain no sources.

Seven sources appear on the Media Bias Chart® this month for the first time:

• CNBC TV Network
• HBO: Surveilled
• MSNBC: Ana Cabrera Reports
• Real America’s Voice: The Charlie Kirk Show
• TBN: The Watchman
• The Don Lemon Show
• WKRN News 2 Nashville: News 2 at 6pm

Don’t see your favorite show on this chart? That doesn’t mean we haven’t rated it! You can look up ratings on all sources we’ve analyzed and create custom chart images using our free mobile app available for Apple and Android. You also can access the free version of the interactive chart on the website, which allows access to data on 250 of our top sources. Daily search limits apply.

For expanded access, please consider a News Nerd subscription, which gives you the ability to search all sources we’ve rated and provides many additional benefits.

When you add in our web/print and podcast/audio ratings, our analysts have fully rated more than 4,170 sources, with commercial data on about 12,600 sources. Keep up on all of our work by joining our email list!