J.J. Pryor

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Politically Speaking

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***Updated on 03/02/2022

Back in the summer of 2020, I spent a huge amount of time collecting data on over 100 different news sources used in the US. I looked at website traffic, domain authority, paywalls, and a company called Ad Fontes Media.

They have an interesting project where they hire people from all sides of the political spectrum to statistically analyze news reporting with a tedious methodology.

As my original article is now a bit out of date, I wanted to do a quick update showing the best and worst-performing news organizations according to their massive data field.

I’ll try to keep it short and sweet here and leave some links for further reading if you’re keen.

Ad Fontes Media is a Public Benefit Corporation in Colorado, a for-profit company with a stated mission of benefiting the public. (No, I’ve never heard of these either.) It was started by a patent attorney named Vanessa Otero after her essay about news bias went viral almost 5 years ago.

Since my first article, they have added a large team of almost 40 individual analysts from many different political leanings.

According to their summary page, they’ve rated at least 8,500 articles and TV/Internet shows so far. Each one is rated by a minimum of three analysts from left, right, and center points of view.

They’ve examined at least 400 different news sources so far, but only show a source in their public data set if its had at least 7 different ratings so far. If a news organization is larger, they aim for over 100 ratings.

Ad Fontes used two final metrics for each individual news source. They call these the ‘reliability’ and ‘bias’ scores. It’s important to note that each one of these…