Quick Facts Table
| Detail | Information |
| Original creator | Vanessa Otero — patent attorney from Denver, Colorado |
| First published | December 2016 — on a personal blog called All Generalizations Are False |
| Went viral | December 2016 — on Imgur image-sharing platform |
| Company formed | 2018 — Ad Fontes Media, Inc. (public benefit corporation, Colorado) |
| Name meaning | “Ad Fontes” = Latin for “to the source” |
| Two axes measured | Political bias (left ↔ right) and Reliability (low ↔ high) |
| Political bias scale | The most extreme left is -42, and the most extreme right is +42 |
| Reliability scale | 0 (Fabricated/Inaccurate) to 64 (Original Fact Reporting) |
| Current analysts | 47 active professional analysts (as of 2025) |
| Total ratings in dataset | 83,700+ as of September 2025 |
| Sources evaluated | 2,710 web/print sources; 830 podcasts; 800+ TV/video programs |
| Flagship chart updates | Twice per year |
| Main competitor | AllSides Media Bias Chart (founded 2012) |
| FTC investigation | June 2025 — civil investigative demand issued to Ad Fontes Media |
| Free educational downloads | Yes — now available free (previously $14.99) |
| App available | Yes — Android and iOS |
Something Changed in 2016. Did You Notice?
It was a pretty ordinary December. But something was happening online that a lot of people couldn’t quite explain.
People were fighting with their family and friends over news articles. They weren’t disagreeing about opinions. They were disagreeing about whether things were even real.
One person would share a story and feel completely certain about it. Another person would look at the same source and call it garbage. Both people were convinced. Neither one could understand the other.
That friction is what Vanessa Otero was staring at when she made something that would later be seen by millions of people.
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How One Person’s Hobby Changed Media Literacy
Vanessa Otero wasn’t a journalist. She wasn’t a professor of communications. She was a patent attorney from Denver, Colorado, who ran a personal blog.
She watched people argue over news sources on Facebook and felt frustrated. Not by the arguing — but by the fact that nobody had a shared map of where different sources actually stood.
So she made one.
She drew a chart. She placed news outlets onto a grid based on two things: how biased they were politically, and how reliable their journalism was. She posted it to her blog in December 2016.
Within days, the image exploded on Imgur, a picture-sharing website. It got shared and reshared across platforms millions of times.
Vanessa had not planned to start a company. But the response told her something real was there.
What the Chart Actually Shows
The chart might look complicated the first time you see it. But once you understand the two axes, everything clicks.
The horizontal axis runs left to right. On the far left are sources with the most progressive, liberal slant. On the far right are sources with the most conservative slant. Dead center means the source tries to present multiple viewpoints without pushing one direction.
The vertical axis runs bottom to top. At the top are sources doing original, verified fact reporting. In the middle are sources doing analysis, opinion, and commentary. At the bottom are sources publishing inaccurate or fabricated content.
The shape that emerges from this grid is often described as an inverted U. The most reliable sources cluster in the middle of the bias axis and near the top. As you move toward the extreme left or right, reliability tends to drop.
That’s an important thing to understand. Being slightly left-leaning or slightly right-leaning doesn’t automatically mean a source is unreliable. Bias and accuracy are two separate measurements. A source can provide information truthfully while maintaining a distinct political viewpoint.
How the Scoring Actually Works
Vanessa originally rated everything herself, which she later admitted was a problem. One person’s perspective, no matter how careful, introduces blind spots.
So the methodology evolved.
Today, every piece of content is evaluated by a group of three analysts — one who leans left, one who leans right, and one in the center. That trio scores the same article or episode independently.
Their scores are averaged. Low-quality content and highly biased content push a source’s overall score downward more than high-quality content lifts it upward. This is intentional. The worst content a source publishes matters more than their best.
As of September 2025, the team has produced over 83,700 individual ratings across thousands of sources. Analysts go through 30 hours of initial training and at least 40 more hours of ongoing training per year.
The flagship chart — the visual snapshot most people share — is published twice a year. The interactive version online updates more regularly based on ongoing analyst work.
Where Do Specific News Sources Fall?
This is what most people actually want to know. So here’s an honest summary of how the chart tends to place major outlets, based on current data.
Sources like the Associated Press, Reuters, and BBC News tend to land near the top center — high reliability, minimal political lean. They’re the reference points the chart is essentially built around.
The New York Times, Washington Post, and NPR typically appear in the upper left portion — solid reliability, leaning left. Fox News occupies an interesting position: its straight news reporting lands higher than its opinion programming. Fox Opinion content drops significantly on both the reliability axis and sits further right.
MSNBC’s opinion content sits in the upper-left to mid-left zone. The Daily Wire appears further right with lower reliability scores.
InfoWars is placed at the far bottom-right — extreme bias, extremely low reliability. When InfoWars creator Alex Jones saw this placement in 2018, he accused Ad Fontes of representing “dying dinosaur media’s extreme liberal bias.” InfoWars responded by publishing their own chart placing themselves as “independent” and representing “freedom,” while labeling the Associated Press as “tyranny.” That counter-chart was widely mocked by journalists.
The AllSides Chart: A Different Animal
Ad Fontes isn’t the only game in town. AllSides has been around since 2012, predating Ad Fontes by four years.
Their approach is different in some important ways.
AllSides only rates written online content. No TV, no podcasts, no radio. Ad Fontes covers all of those.
AllSides uses a five-point scale: Left, Lean Left, Center, Lean Right, Right. It’s simpler and less granular than Ad Fontes. They also combine blind surveys of ordinary Americans with editorial panels, giving readers a sense of what average people across the country think about a source’s bias.
Accuracy and believability are not rated by AllSides, as stated clearly. Their job, in their own words, is not to be a “Ministry of Truth.” A source can be accurate and still biased. A source can be biased and still accurate. They separate those two things.
Ad Fontes measures both. AllSides measures only one.
Neither method is wrong. They answer slightly different questions. Many media literacy educators recommend using both together.
Reliability vs. Bias: Why the Difference Matters
This is one of the most important things the chart teaches, and it often gets lost in the conversation.
When people say they don’t trust a news source, they usually mean one of two different things. Either they disagree with its political viewpoint, or they believe it publishes false information.
Those are completely different problems.
A source can lean clearly in one political direction and still report verified facts with professional rigor. And a source positioned right in the center of the bias axis can still publish sensationalized, cherry-picked, or sloppy journalism.
The chart separates these dimensions deliberately. The goal is to help you distinguish between “I disagree with this source’s framing” and “this source regularly gets facts wrong.”
Both matter. But they require different responses from a reader.
The FTC Investigation: A 2025 Development
This one surprised people.
In June 2025, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sent what are called civil investigative demand letters to several media rating firms. Ad Fontes Media was one of them.
The FTC asked for detailed information about their operations, finances, methodology, and relationships with other organizations in the industry. The investigation is part of broader government scrutiny of companies that evaluate media for misinformation and harmful content.
What this means for Ad Fontes’s future isn’t yet clear. The investigation was still ongoing as of the writing of this article.
It does raise fair questions. Who watches the watchmen? Companies that rate other companies for bias and reliability should themselves be subject to scrutiny and accountability. The FTC investigation, whatever its outcome, is a reminder that no tool of this kind operates in a vacuum.
The Criticism — From Both Sides
The Media Bias Chart has received criticism from the left and the right. Both sides have called it biased against them.
That’s actually an interesting data point on its own.
Critics on the right argue the chart positions mainstream center-left outlets like the New York Times as more reliable than conservative ones, reflecting a pro-establishment or pro-liberal media bias in the ratings themselves.
Critics on the left argue that positioning outlets like Fox News in the center of the political spectrum — even for straight news reporting — normalizes conservative media and gives it unearned credibility.
Academic researchers have also raised technical criticisms. Texas Tech University researcher Natasha Strydhorst wrote that the chart provides a useful way to study how audiences choose media, but acknowledged it cannot objectively measure media bias — a limitation it shares with all other tools trying to do the same thing.
The chart’s creators don’t claim perfection. The methodology paper on the Ad Fontes website is detailed and transparent. They acknowledge that any human-based rating system has limits.
What they argue — convincingly — is that their system is better than no system at all.
How Schools and Educators Use It
The Media Bias Chart has found a strong home in classrooms across the United States.
Teachers use it to introduce the concept of media literacy — the skill of reading and evaluating news sources critically rather than passively. For students who have grown up in an environment where every opinion gets treated as equally valid, the chart offers a concrete visual tool for thinking about source quality.
Downloads of the static chart are now free for educational use. Previously priced at $14.99, Ad Fontes made the change to expand access for teachers, students, nonprofits, and civic organizations. Commercial licensing for businesses still applies.
The chart is also used in university journalism programs, library systems, and corporate media training. It functions as a shared vocabulary — a place to start a conversation about where your information is coming from.
The Interactive Chart and App
The static chart — the flat image most people share — is just one version of the product.
Ad Fontes also maintains an interactive online version where you can filter sources by type (websites, podcasts, TV), by reliability category, and by bias range. You can explore individual sources and see their specific scores. The data updates regularly based on ongoing analyst work.
There’s also a mobile app available on both Android and iOS. It shows real-time data based on daily analyst ratings, lets users filter and sort by source type, and allows users to save and share curated views of the chart.
For journalists, researchers, and serious news consumers, the interactive version is significantly more useful than the twice-yearly static image.
Should You Trust It? An Honest Assessment
The Media Bias Chart is a useful tool. It is not a perfect one.
Here’s what it does well. It makes the invisible visible. Most people consume news without consciously thinking about a source’s political lean or reliability history. The chart forces that question into the open.
It also uses a repeatable, documented methodology that involves political diversity in the rating panels. That’s more rigorous than one person’s opinion, and more rigorous than crowd-sourced ratings alone.
Here’s what it can’t do. A single score for a news organization doesn’t tell you about every article that organization publishes. A source that scores well overall can publish a terrible piece. A source that scores poorly overall can produce excellent investigative journalism.
The chart is a starting point. Not a verdict.
The best way to use it is exactly how it was designed — as a map that helps you know what questions to ask before you trust what you’re reading.
Final Words
The Media Bias Chart was born from a feeling that most of us have had at some point. The feeling that different people are living inside completely different realities — fed by completely different versions of the news.
Vanessa Otero didn’t solve that problem with a single image. But she gave millions of people a shared reference point. A map, not a rulebook. A place to start the conversation, not end it.
The best thing you can do with the chart is exactly what it was designed for. Look at where you get your news. Understand whether those sources lean in a political direction. Understand whether their journalism is reliable. Then go read something from the other side of the chart and see what you’ve been missing.
The chart won’t make everyone agree. It wasn’t built to. It was built to make sure that when we disagree, we’re at least disagreeing about real things — not whether facts themselves exist.
That’s worth something.
FAQs
Q1: What is the Media Bias Chart?
It’s a visual tool created by Vanessa Otero that rates news sources on two scales: how politically biased they are (left to right) and how reliable their journalism is (low to high). It’s published by a company called Ad Fontes Media.
Q2: Who made the Media Bias Chart and why?
Vanessa Otero, a patent attorney from Denver, created the first version in December 2016 as a personal project after seeing people fight on Facebook about news sources during the 2016 election. The chart went viral and she founded Ad Fontes Media in 2018 to maintain and expand it.
Q3: What does “Ad Fontes” mean?
It’s Latin for “to the source.” The name reflects the organization’s method: rating sources by actually reading and analyzing their content rather than relying on reputation or public perception.
Q4: How do they rate news sources?
Teams of three analysts — one leaning left, one leaning right, one in the center — independently rate the same articles or episodes. Scores are averaged. Content that is low quality or highly biased pulls a source’s overall score down more heavily than good content lifts it.
Q5: What are the two axes of the chart?
The horizontal axis measures political bias, ranging from the most extreme left at -42 to the most extreme right at +42. The vertical axis measures reliability, from 0 (Fabricated/Inaccurate) to 64 (Original Fact Reporting).
Q6: Does being politically biased mean a source is unreliable?
No. Political bias and reliability are separate measurements. A source can lean clearly in one direction and still report facts accurately. The chart separates these two things deliberately.
Q7: What’s the difference between Ad Fontes and AllSides?
Ad Fontes measures both bias and reliability across web, print, TV, podcasts, and radio. AllSides only rates online written content on a simpler five-point scale (Left to Right) and does not rate accuracy. Both are useful for different purposes.
Q8: How many sources does the chart cover?
As of September 2025, Ad Fontes has rated over 83,700 individual articles and episodes from 2,710 web/print sources, 830 podcasts, and 800+ TV/video programs.
Q9: Can I download the Media Bias Chart for free?
Yes. Static chart downloads for educational, non-commercial, and civic use are now free. Commercial licensing applies for business use. An interactive online version and mobile app are also available.
Q10: Has the chart faced any government scrutiny?
Yes. In June 2025, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission issued a civil investigative demand to Ad Fontes Media requesting information about its operations, finances, methodology, and industry relationships as part of a broader review of media rating firms.
Q11: Who criticizes the chart and why?
Critics from both sides accuse it of bias against their preferred outlets. Right-leaning critics argue it inflates the credibility of mainstream left-leaning sources. Left-leaning critics argue it gives unearned legitimacy to conservative media. Academic researchers also note that any human-based rating system has inherent limitations.
Q12: How often is the chart updated?
The flagship printed version is updated twice a year. Based on daily analysis conducted by the team of 47 active analysts, the interactive web version and app are updated more often.
Q13: Is the Media Bias Chart a trustworthy resource?
It is a useful starting point — not a final verdict. It applies a transparent, documented methodology with politically diverse analysts. It cannot capture every article a source publishes, and no single score tells the whole story of an outlet. Use it as one tool among several, always alongside your own critical reading.
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