Here at Ad Fontes Media, we started rating documentaries about current events and politics in 2024 because they present information that strongly influences what viewers think about particular topics. Their content can be judged for reliability and bias just like news content can.

Several news-related documentaries rated by our team were nominees at the 98th Academy Awards earlier this month, and two of them won in their respective categories.

“Mr Nobody Against Putin,” which focuses on a school teacher’s record of the indoctrination of his students to support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, won Best Documentary Feature. 

“All The Empty Rooms,” a Netflix documentary about gun violence that features the untouched bedrooms of children who have been killed, won Best Documentary Short Film. Both of these documentaries can be found in the green box of the March edition of the Media Bias Chart® for TV/Video.

We rate documentaries because they are “news-like” content, and because of their depth on one topic, they can have unusual scores as compared to other types of news content like websites and podcasts. For example, a documentary might earn a very high reliability score, or a very high reliability score combined with a strong left or right bias score.

Keep in mind that a rating of a documentary is an analysis on one long piece of content, so it’s not exactly apples to apples to compare it with ratings of other shows or networks in similar areas of the chart. For example, every other TV show on our chart is made up of ratings from multiple episodes, and each network on our chart is made up of the ratings of all the shows on that network.

You’ll find the following nine documentaries on this edition of the Media Bias Chart®. All but two of these were added to the chart this month for the first time. The new ones are in bold.

• A Faith Under Siege
• All The Empty Rooms
• Electric Vehicles: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
• HBO: The Dark Money Game
• HBO: Thoughts & Prayers: How to Survive an Active Shooter in America
• Mr Nobody Against Putin
• Paramount+: Bodyguard of Lies
• RT: An American’s Russian Dream
• The Age of Disclosure

“All The Empty Room” and “Mr Nobody Against Putin” are the only two documentaries on this month’s chart whose ratings place them within the green box. Remember: Sources rated as minimally biased and fact-based are found within the green box. In all, 14 shows appear in the green box of the March chart. (More TV/video sources — and more documentaries — fall within the green box, and we’ll feature those on charts in the future.)

• 2WAY: TONIGHT
• ABC: World News Tonight with David Muir
• All The Empty Rooms
• C-SPAN Live Stream
• CBN: Christian World News
• CNBC: The Exchange
• CNN: CNN 10
• CNN: The Situation Room
• EWTN: EWTN News Nightly
• Fox News: Special Report w/ Bret Baier
• Merit Street Media: The News on Merit TV
• Mr Nobody Against Putin
• NBC: Meet The Press
• NewsNation TV Network

Our analyst team has now fully rated more than 870 news and news-like TV/video shows. This chart contains 44 of them (you can see a list of those 44 here). It’s impossible to put 800 TV/video sources we’ve rated in one image (the result would be a completely unreadable chart), so we choose a selection of sources to feature each month. In order to make the logos as large and readable as possible, we have magnified a portion of the chart and removed portions around the edges that contain no sources.

In addition to the seven documentaries that debuted on this month’s chart, you’ll find the Taylor Lorenz YouTube channel for the first time.

Don’t see your favorite show on the March chart? You can look up ratings on all sources we’ve analyzed and create custom chart images using our free mobile app available 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! In all, our analysts have fully rated more than 4,640 sources, with commercial data on about 14,100 sources.

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