The Election is a Month Away. Can You Trust the Shows You Watch?
Author:
Date:
09/30/2024
Ad Fontes Media has released its September Media Bias Chart® for TV/video sources. It features many top network and cable TV news shows, as well as several popular video programs on YouTube and Rumble.
With the election only a month away, it’s more important than ever to make sure the news you watch is balanced and reliable. Remember, our methodology is based on content analysis, which means our analysts watch a sample of episodes from these programs and rate that content for bias and reliability.
If you look closely at the chart, you’ll find shows from particular channels and networks spread across the chart from top to bottom. This reinforces our previous conclusion that not all content on various news channels is the same. For example, you can see an analysis comparing programs on MSNBC and Fox News here.
September’s TV/video chart features 54 of the more than 640 TV/video programs our team has fully rated. If you’d like to see a list of the 54 sources included on the TV/video static chart this month, it’s on our website. 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.
Four shows appear on the chart for the first time:
- Election Time (YouTube)
- NewsNation: The Hill Sunday with Chris Stirewalt
- Real America’s Voice: Securing America with Frank Gaffney
- The Stephanie Miller Show
Don’t see your favorite show on the September chart? That doesn’t mean we haven’t rated it! It’s impossible to show the logos of 640 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 about 4,000 sources, with commercial data on over 11,100 sources. Become a subscriber to have additional access to our data!
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Beth Heldebrandt is a Media Research Specialist at Ad Fontes Media. She has more than 30 years of experience in the fields of journalism and public relations, and was an adjunct instructor of journalism for 17 years at Eastern Illinois University. Beth has a B.A. in journalism from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and an M.A. in English from Eastern Illinois University. She’s a mom and grandma, and enjoys traveling, puzzles and reading.
