Don’t Make Assumptions About the Bias or Reliability of a Podcast: Listen to It

Today we’re releasing the July edition of the Podcast/Audio Media Bias Chart®, which includes 44 shows. Here’s a couple of things to note about his edition of the chart:

• It contains some of the most popular news podcasts, such as The Joe Rogan Experience and This Past Weekend w/ Theo Vonn, but it’s missing others; for example, The Daily from the New York Times or Up First from NPR. That’s because only a few dozen shows fit on the chart at a time.
  
  So if you’re wondering where a particular show falls on the chart, and it’s not on this image (see a list of the shows on this chart here), you can search for it on our free mobile app for Apple and Android. You also can access the free version of the Interactive Media Bias Chart® on the website, which allows access to data on 250 of our top sources. In all, our team has rated more than 900 podcasts, so there’s a good chance we’ve rated the show that you’re looking for.
• The Bret Baier Podcast – Common Ground makes its debut on this chart. “Common Ground” is the topic for Thursday episodes of Baier’s podcast, which are described as “different perspectives coming together to discuss issues of the day and how Americans can find common ground in a polarized world.”
  
  Bret Baier is a longtime Fox News TV host, and some may find it surprising that his podcast falls within the green box (top middle) of the chart. (Sources in the green box have been found by our team to consistently provide minimally biased, fact-based information.) The Tuesday edition of Baier’s podcast, subtitled “All American Panel,” also falls within the green box.
  

If you’ve been following us for a while, though, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Baier’s Fox News TV show, “Special Report w/ Brett Baier,” also falls inside the green box. Just like Fox News TV programming, the bias and reliability scores of Fox podcasts vary — not all Fox News (or CNN or MS NOW) content is the same! (Read more about that here.) Here’s a look at where all Fox News podcasts that we’ve rated fall on the Media Bias Chart®:

As you can see, several Fox News podcasts have a “middle/balanced” bias while others are “strong right” or “hyper-partisan right.” Some are generally fact-based, many fall into the category of “opinion” and one, “FOX Across America with Jimmy Failla,” has been rated as “contains misleading info.”

We often get comments from people who doubt our ratings because they have a pre-conceived idea about what NPR, or CNN, or Fox News is like, and they assume that all articles and shows from each company are the same. They sometimes make these assumptions without reading the article, listening to the podcast or watching the TV show. But we do. Our process of analyzing the content is designed to help us to avoid these blind spots.

In addition to The Bret Baier Podcast – Common Ground, nine podcasts fall within the green box on the July edition of the Media Bias Chart® for podcasts: 

• Apple News Today
• CNN One Thing
• Cool Stuff Daily
• Front Burner
• Political Gabfest
• The Dallas Morning News – Daily News Roundup
• The Focus Group with Sarah Longwell
• The McCarthy Report
• The World and Everything In It

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

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

• Cool Stuff Daily
• Live From The Table
• Means Morning News
• The Gist
• The Newsmax Daily
• The Scott Jennings Show

If you’d like to create your own customized charts, you can do that with a News Newbie or News Nerd subscription. Our subscribers can search all 4,790 sources our team has fully rated (websites, podcasts and TV/video) on the Interactive Media Bias Chart® and have access to our free weekly Navigating the News sessions with Ad Fontes CEO and founder Vanessa Otero!

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