Apr 18, 2023

Everything wrong with the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart

What’s wrong with Ad Fontes Media, the Media Bias Chart company? Oh my god, where do we begin?

1.) They put all the news outlets together on a chart with Breitbart and Infowars.

This is going to mislead people into thinking disinformation outlets are just “very biased news” — a hop and a skip away from NPR and Washington Post.

2.) Their little X-Y chart creates false equivalencies that mislead readers into distrusting actual journalism.

If you read this chart like you’re meant to read it, you’ll walk away thinking Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and Vanity Fair are equally reliable. And that Breitbart produces the same level of fake news as Rolling Stone.

Sorry, that’s just not true. The fact is, the most dangerous and violent rhetoric is coming from one side of the political spectrum.

Don’t drag our poor news outlets into this because you needed to make your X-Y chart look more symmetrical.

3.) Their methodology is unspeakably shoddy.

Thirty three “analysts” (random people who identify as left/liberals, centrists and right/conservative) score a bunch of articles and debate their ratings with each other. The final score is the average of their opinions.

In other words, the methodology is “vibes.”

A lot of these disinfo outlets are calling outright for the eradication of transgender people — and even coordinating harassment campaigns.

And here’s Ad Fontes Media asking the important question: Is it biased to the “right” or the “left?”

We’ll admit it. This chart makes us irate.