What Does it Mean if a Source has a ‘Middle/Balanced’ Bias?

Today we’re releasing the July edition of the Media Bias Chart® for Web/Print, which features 109 of the 2,950 websites our team has fully rated for bias and reliability.

You’ll notice that dozens of sources on this edition of the Media Bias Chart® fall in the left-right middle of the chart. This means the website has been rated with a -6 to 6 score for bias overall, giving it a bias rating of “Middle or Balanced.” 

Sources can fall into this category for several reasons: 1, the content from the website has been found  to contain very little or no bias; 2, the content from the site has a variety of bias ratings, from left, right and center, and the average of those bias scores places the website in the middle; or 3, the content of the site reflects a centrist bias, because on the U.S. political spectrum, there isn’t just a left/Democrat/liberal bias vs. a right/Republican/conservative bias. There’s also a centrist bias on various news topics.

Many sources near the top of the chart fall in the “Middle-Balanced” section of the Media Bias Chart® because there is a connection between high-effort fact reporting and low bias (facts, by definition, are not biased). But you’ll notice that a few sources near the bottom of the chart also fall in the bias category of “Middle/Balanced.” Why?

Let’s look at the National Enquirer, for example. Much of the content published on this website is celebrity news. It’s often unsubstantiated rumors and not fact-based information, which explains the National Enquirer’s placement near the bottom of the chart. But it’s not political, which is why most of the content rated by our team had a bias rating at or near 0.

Vanessa Otero, founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media, will talk more about “Middle/Balanced” bias on Thursday, July 9, as part of her Navigating the News series for paid subscribers. You can find more information about that here.

Sources in the green box (top middle) of the chart have been rated by our team to have a “Middle/Balanced” or “Skews Left/Skews Right” bias and to provide fact-based information. Here’s a list of all sources from the July Media Bias Chart® for Web/Print that fall within the green box.

• ADN America
• Al Jazeera (website)
• AL.com
• AllMusic
• AP | Associated Press
• Axios
• CNN (website)
• Edinburgh Live
• EL SOL News
• FOX 11 LA KTTV
• Fox Business (website)
• Florida’s Voice
• Hawaii Tribune-Herald
• HuffPost
• IndyStar | Indianapolis Star
• Jacksonville Journal-Courier
• MinistryWatch
• Nextgov/FCW
• Pew Research Center
• San Antonio Current
• Semafor
• SF Examiner
• Skeptical Inquirer
• Straight Arrow News
• The Economist
• The Guardian
• The New York Times
• The Post-Journal
• The Reload
• The Thomas B. Fordham Institute
• Wall Street Journal
• Washington Post
• WiscNews
• World News Group
• USAFacts

Sometimes people are looking for a source on our monthly charts, and it’s on there but difficult to find. We include as many logos as possible in order to meet demand, but we realize that the chart can get crowded and hard to read. That’s why we publish a list of all sources on each chart. You can find a list of the 109 sources on this edition of the web chart here. (Charts with podcast and TV/video sources will be published later this month).

Twelve sources make their debut on this month’s chart.

• AllMusic
• EL SOL News
• Florida’s Voice
• Jewish Journal
• Jose Nino Unfiltered
• Liberty Nation
• Nextgov/FCW
• Page Six
• San Antonio Current
• The Editorial Board – John Stoehr
• The Post-Journal
• WiscNews

If you’re interested in our ratings for a website not on this chart, you can search for it (and all 4,770 web, podcast and TV/video sources we’ve rated) on our free mobile app for Android or Apple (daily search limits apply).

You can also search for sources on our Interactive Media Bias Chart®. The free interactive chart on the website lets you search 250 of the top websites, podcasts and TV/video programs (daily search limits apply). To search for sources not included in those 250 (and to be able to filter our data by ownership, geographic location and more) you’ll need to subscribe for as little as $5 a month.

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