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The Factual’s Media Ecosystem 2022

Some of the simplest questions about the news can be hard to answer. Does CNN produce reliable news? Can Fox News be trusted? How biased is the New York Times?

Ideally, we wouldn’t need to ask these questions. However, a highly polarized political environment and an incessant drive for ad revenue have raised questions about bias and journalistic quality in the last decade.

Asking for completely unbiased news is a fool’s errand—bias is firmly a part of our world. The best we can do is to know and understand bias, read widely, and prioritize sources that attempt to provide highly factual, objective news. Using The Factual’s algorithm, it’s possible to explore which sites are closest to achieving that standard.

The Factual’s Media Bias and Credibility Chart

Why Make a Media Bias and Credibility Chart?

With the increasing polarization of the media environment in recent years, many media bias charts have been created, each with a slightly different take on the best way to visualize the news media ecosystem. These tend to have limitations, such as reliance on human evaluators, complicated designs, or too much focus on political classifications. We believe that bias is just one dimension for rating how good a news article is, and ultimately what readers want is to find the most informative news sources. Our intention is to create a simple, easy-to-use resource that focuses solely on the informative quality of news articles. By focusing on key components of what makes an article credible and reliable, we have attempted to reimagine a media bias chart that prioritizes data, not politics.

The Best Local News Sources

Sometimes we don’t need to hear the latest news from Capitol Hill or from the other side of the world. Sometimes we just need the latest news from our city, our county, or our region. Local news sources and journalists have the context and familiarity that is critical for understanding how events really impact citizens, be it in downtown New York, in the Midwest, in sunny California, or in the Deep South.

Many local news organizations have been suffering for decades as media concentrates under conglomerates, internet-based media squeezes the market, and small papers die out. Amid these challenges, some local news publications have adapted their models to changing times, picked up new platforms and strategies for reaching customers, and carry on delivering much-needed local insights on the latest stories. So, which local news sites stand out today as the best sources for informative, unbiased journalism?

The Best Unbiased Daily News Sources

From climate change to abortion to immigration to foreign policy, news articles can frequently move between objective and subjective analysis issues. For readers seeking rapid access to the facts, this can mean a constant battle to separate critical updates of substance from opinion-driven analysis.

Opinion isn’t always a bad thing — often highly opinionated writing is also substantiated with evidence and solid reporting. But American readers have expressed interest in “unbiased” news and perceive partisan news to be a major issue. The Covid-19 pandemic has reinforced that it is exceptionally difficult to contend with twenty-first-century problems when we can’t even agree on the facts.

To answer the call, The Factual assessed over 240 English-language news sites to find the best, most unbiased daily news sources. By cross-referencing scores for credibility and bias, The Factual identified the following five sources as the best options for unbiased news — based on data, not politics.

Are Media Bias Charts Reliable?

In an increasingly polarized world, more people are looking for unbiased information. One of the tools commonly used to find such information is media bias charts, the most popular ones being from Ad Fontes Media and AllSides. How reliable and useful are these charts?

Are There Two Sides to Every Story?

When I was a young boy, I saw that my father read two or even three newspapers daily. When I asked him why he didn’t just read one paper, he said “You should never trust any one source to tell you the whole story.” His advice remains even more pertinent today given the proliferation of news sources and increasing polarization in the media.

But people sometimes argue against this model, asking “what if one news outlet is telling the truth and the other isn’t?” Many noted journalists decry the idea of always needing to hear “both sides.” “Bothsidesism” is essentially the presentation of ideas as being of equal value without necessarily accounting for the strength of the associated arguments. So, are there always two sides to a news story?

Gerrymandering and the Problems with American Redistricting

Gerrymandering is one of those classic American problems — alongside high prescription drug prices or overpaying for medical care — on which most Americans agree but little progress seems to be made. In two-thirds of U.S. states, elected politicians get to redraw the boundaries of political districts, often for political benefit, despite the practice being highly unpopular among everyday Americans. In a poll by The Factual of 573 readers, 88% said that redistricting should be handled by independent commissions rather than elected officials, thereby limiting the ability of state legislatures to alter district boundaries for political gain. At the national level, polls in 2017 and 2019 showed that more than 70% of voters from all parties agreed the Supreme Court should limit the practice.

Is Facebook Bad?

Revelations from whistleblowers this year paint a picture of Facebook as a global tech giant that is growing rapidly but failing to acknowledge or address a host of negative impacts from its platforms. The company has reportedly failed to mitigate disinformation, including related to Covid-19, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and other events abroad, and has knowingly suppressed information that could be harmful to the company’s bottom line.

Does The Factual Have a Left-Leaning Bias?

Regular readers of The Factual’s daily newsletter may have noticed that left-leaning sources are ranked as the top-rated article on a topic more often than right-leaning sources. Does this suggest The Factual has a left-leaning bias?

While we’ve explored this issue twice before, this post explains why this pattern happens and how The Factual’s ratings and curation system delivers unbiased news. The Factual algorithm automatically rates individual articles based on four factors:

The Worst Covid-19 News Sources of 2020

How does the Covid-19 virus work? Which preventative actions should I follow to keep loved ones safe? When will the pandemic end? These are the sorts of questions many people sought answers for over the last year, and journalists worked tirelessly to supply the truth. Last week, The Factual looked at which outlets produced the best, most well-researched journalism over 2020 — now we want to look at which news outlets didn’t so well.