According to Pew Research Center, more and more Americans rely on podcasts as a source of news, a trend that has grown since 2020. About one-third of adults in the U.S. now say they sometimes or often get their news from podcasts, and that number is even higher — 39% — for younger adults (those under age 50).

At Ad Fontes Media, we started rating news podcasts in 2023. We’ve now fully rated 860 of them (more than 3,370 episodes!) and have analyzed content from about 100 more. Our team spends dozens of hours a month listening to podcast episodes and rating them for their bias and reliability.

Over the years we’ve watched as more and more people started recording podcasts, and more and more people started listening to them. Larger audiences have led podcasts and their hosts to be more influential in the news ecosystem; that was evident when presidential candidates regularly did podcast interviews in 2024.

Now, the newly appointed Pentagon Press Corps is primarily made up of podcasters, bloggers and news influencers, giving these “new media” outlets more access and increased ability to cover the government. Notably, many of these news and information sources are rated low for reliability, and many have previously focused only on creating opinion content (which is common for political podcasts) rather than undertaking journalistic activities such as news gathering, fact reporting, fact checking, and editing. We anticipate this will affect the level of reliable news reporting in and around the Pentagon going forward. 

The December edition of the Podcast/Audio Media Bias Chart® we’re releasing today includes 48 podcasts (see a list of them here). We choose only a few dozen to include on each month’s static Media Bias Chart because it’s impossible to show all of them in one image. In order to make the logos as large and as readable as possible, we’ve magnified a portion of the chart and removed portions around the edges that contain no sources.

Sources in the green box of the chart have been found by our team to consistently provide minimally biased, fact-based information. Twelve podcasts fall within the green box on the December edition: 

• Autocracy in America
• Banished with Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder
• Conversations with Bill Kristol
• Fox News Rundown
• Horns of a Dilemma
• Just Asking Questions
• NPR News Now
• NPR: Fresh Air
• The New Yorker Radio Hour
• This Morning with Gordon Deal
• Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson
• WSJ: Tech News Briefing

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

Seven podcasts are included on the chart this month for the first time (three of these fall within the green box):

• America Dissected
• Bill O’Reilly’s No Spin News and Analysis
• Bo Snerdley’s Rush Hour
• Horns of a Dilemma
• NPR: Fresh Air
• Red Menace
• WSJ: Tech News Briefing

If your favorite podcast is not on the December chart, that doesn’t mean we haven’t rated it! Search for your favorite show on our free mobile app 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.

To get expanded access, you’ll need a News Newbie or News Nerd subscription. Our subscribers can search all sources our team has fully rated (websites, podcasts and TV/video), with other added benefits! 

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