Ad Fontes Media has released its July Media Bias Chart® for TV/video sources, and among the dozens of TV programs and YouTube shows featured you’ll find an interesting comparison of cable news shows.

As we examined back in May, we’ve found that not all shows from cable news networks are the same, and this is evident if you look closely at the July TV/video chart. Several shows from CNN, Fox News and MSNBC are featured, and they are sprinkled across the chart, from top to bottom and left to right.

Let’s make a quick comparison between shows from Fox News and MSNBC:

You’ll notice that both “MSNBC: Way Too Early With Jonathan Lemire” and “Fox News: Fox News Live” appear in the green box of the chart, which means the content contains more fact reporting than analysis or opinion. Specifically, “Way Too Early With Jonathan Lemire” has a bias score of -7.3 (skews left) and “Fox News Live” has a bias score of 10.97 (skews right). Both have a reliability score in the “mix of fact reporting and analysis or simple fact reporting” section (42.33 reliability score for the MSNBC show and 41.67 for Fox News).

“MSNBC: Morning Joe” and “Fox News: America’s Newsroom w/ Bill Hemmer & Dana Perino” appear in the yellow box, meaning they contain more analysis and opinion than fact reporting. Specifically, “Morning Joe” has a bias score of -14.7 (strong left) and a reliability score of 29.33 (opinion or wide variation in reliability). “America’s Newsroom” has a bias score of 15.54 (strong right) and a reliability score of 36.6 (analysis or wide variation of reliability).

Finally, let’s look at weekend shows from each network. “MSNBC: The Weekend” has a bias score of -20.4 (hyper-partisan left) and conversely, “Fox News: The Big Weekend Show” has a bias score of 21.56 (hyper-partisan right). Both have a reliability score that puts them in the orange box, meaning the content contains “selective or incomplete story/unfair persuasion/propaganda” (22.06 reliability score for the MSNBC show and 19.89 for Fox News).

Remember, our methodology is based on content analysis, which means our analysts watch a sample of episodes from these programs and rate them for bias and reliability. They don’t assign particular ratings just because they know the reputation of MSNBC and Fox News. Each episode is rated on its own content, and the scores are assigned accordingly. 

July’s TV/video chart features 64 of the more than 630 TV/video programs our team has rated (that’s almost 3,700 episodes watched by our analysts!). If you’d like to see a list of the 64 sources included on the TV/video static chart this month, it’s on our website.

Eight shows appear on the chart for the first time:

• Al Jazeera: The Stream
• CBS San Francisco KPIX: CBS News Bay Area with Juliette Goodrich – 6PM
• China Uncensored (YouTube)
• Merit Street Media: The Scott Rasmussen Show
• MSNBC: Way Too Early With Jonathan Lemire
• NBC: Today
• Real America’s Voice: The War Room with Stephen K. Bannon
• Scripps News: The National Report

Don’t see your favorite show on the July chart? That doesn’t mean we haven’t rated it! It’s impossible to show the logos of 600 different programs in one image — they overlap each other and the result is a completely unreadable chart. That’s why we choose a sample to feature each month.

If you want to check our ratings on more TV/video sources, you can access a selection of them for free on the Interactive Media Bias Chart® on our website. Or, you can search all sources we’ve rated on the free Media Bias Chart app, available for iPhone and Android. Daily search limits apply.

When you add in our web/print and podcast/audio ratings, our analysts have fully rated over 3,900 sources, with commercial data on over 11,000 sources. Become a subscriber to have additional access to our data!

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