Ad Fontes Media is proud to announce new data within the Media Bias Chart® to help advertisers and brands identify news outlets owned by, hosted by, or targeted to diverse communities.

The interactive Media Bias Chart now has search capability to find media outlets with diverse ownership, as well as those with minority hosts, or those making content targeted at those communities. This is key for advertisers meeting their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals.

Many companies are making a concerted effort to invest in diverse media, but what does that really mean? It can mean several different things, from investing in diverse-owned media, to elevating diverse voices by supporting content made by or for diverse communities.

Now, in addition to more than 3,000 news sources indexed in the Media Bias Chart, we have several types of diversity filters. To start, commercial users of our platform have information on BIPOC media. If you’re not familiar, BIPOC is an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. We also have information on LGBTQ media.

How did we do this? We researched it the hard way. Our research team, headed by a former journalist, went through each of the thousands of news and information sources we’ve rated and looked up publicly available information from these sources about their owners, audiences, and hosts.

The search function on the interactive Media Bias Chart now has three different options: BIPOC Owned means that the outlet or publication is owned by people of color; BIPOC Targeted means the publication states that it is targeted toward one or more BIPOC communities; BIPOC Hosted means that the host or creator of the content is of color. As you’ll see from the following charts these are not necessarily the same publications and properties

You’ll also notice that this is a much smaller subset compared to all the sources we’ve rated. Now, we may not have identified 100% of BIPOC targeted and owned media — we only label them when we find publicly available diversity information. However, when you look at media content that is created and/or hosted by BIPOC talent, the universe is much broader, especially when you include podcasts and YouTube content.

These charts show that there’s a big difference between the three, and why reliability and bias overlays become important when making investment decisions.

This first is the result of a search for BIPOC-owned media. You’ll note most of the content generated by BIPOC-owned media leans left. That may or may not be in line with your DEI goals.; if targeting left-leaning BIPOC-owned media is in line with your DEI goals, it’s important to note that there is content on the lower left side of the chart that is low-reliability and highly biased.

This second search is for content made expressly to reach BIPOC audiences. As you can see here, although these sources target BIPOC audiences, they are not necessarily BIPOC-owned outlets; some are and some aren’t. BIPOC-targeted content also leans left, but it includes very highly reliable content from well-known properties with minimal bias in the middle top of the chart. You also have content that is more opinionated or biased, as well as content that might be selective, incomplete, propagandistic, or contain misleading information (found farther out to the left on the bias spectrum).

This final search is for BIPOC-hosted media. While content hosted by people who identify as BIPOC comes from political points of view across the spectrum, it becomes clear why it’s important to layer on reliability and bias. You simply can’t assume someone’s political lean, or the reliability of the information they provide, based on their identity.

We also have similar data on LGBTQ-owned, LGBTQ community-targeted and LGBTQ-hosted media. As with BIPOC media, we only label them under these categories when we find publicly available information from the publications or creators themselves. You can see from this data again that a publication or person’s identity does not automatically correlate with the political bias or reliability of the information they provide.

If you’re interested in learning more, come to our website and schedule a demo with us.

Vanessa Otero is founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media, maker of the Media Bias Chart, and dedicated to building a better internet by helping advertising find great content.