This chart by PresidentHealy seems to be based more or less on MBFC ratings. Click to enlarge.
Here is how the Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) website rated different media outlets in 2017. Outlets are listed below by level of fact checking and political bias when it comes to US news. Those with links have posts of their own on this blog.
- VERY HIGH fact checking:
- Left:
- Left Centre: BBC, NPR.
- Centre: AP News, Ballotpedia, Big Think, C-SPAN, Gallup, PolitiFact, Pew Research, PRRI, Reuters.
- Pro-Science: NASA, Psychology Today.
- Right Centre:
- Right:
- Extreme Right:
- HIGH fact checking:
- Left: Black Agenda Report, Cosmopolitan, Daily Beast, Democracy Now, Electronic Intifada, Esquire, Huffington Post, Mediaite, Media Matters, Mother Jones, New Republic, New York magazine, New Yorker, Pink News, Salon, Slate, The Young Turks, TheGrio, The Nation, The Root, TPM, Truthdig, Vanity Fair, Vox.
- Left Centre: ABC News, ACLU, ADL, Al Jazeera, Atlanta Black Star, Axios, Baltimore Sun, Bloomberg, Boston Globe, Business Insider, Bustle, CBC, CBS News, Chicago Sun Times, Chicago Tribune, CNBC, DW News, FiveThirtyEight, France 24, Glamour, Global Post, Global News, Haaretz, Harper’s, Heavy, Houston Chronicle, Human Rights Watch, LA Times, Metro, Miami Herald, Mic, MSN, NBC News, New York Times, NewsOne, Newsy, PBS NewsHour, Philadelphia Inquirer, Quartz, RationalWiki, Sky News, SPLC, The Atlantic, The Forward, The Guardian, The Independent, The Intercept, The Real News Network, The Week, Time, Times of Israel, US News & World Report, Vice, Washington Post, Wired.
- Centre: Ahram Online, AFP, Africa News, Al Arabiya, Amnesty International, CGTN, China Daily, Christian Science Monitor, Consortium News, Financial Times, i24, IBT, Jerusalem Post, Know Your Meme, Politico, Snopes, South China Morning Post, The Economist, Times of India, USA Today, VOA, Vocativ, Vote Smart, Wikipedia.
- Pro-Science: Discover, National Geographic, Scientific American, WebMD.
- Right Centre: Christianity Today, Circa News, Daily Telegraph, Des Moines Register, Fortune, Real Clear Politics, Times of London, Wall Street Journal, Washington Examiner, Washington Times.
- Right: Daily Express, Hot Air, New York Observer, The Federalist, Weekly Standard.
- Extreme Right:
- MIXED fact checking:
- Left: AlterNet, CNN, Crooks & Liars, Daily Kos, Jezebel, MSNBC, Newsweek, Raw Story, Shareblue, Splinter, TeleSUR, ThinkProgress, Truthout, Wonkette.
- Left Centre: Buzzfeed, Fusion, Inquisitr, New York Daily News, The Hill, Yahoo News.
- Centre: Patheos.
- Pro-Science:
- Right Centre: New York Post, RT, Sputnik News.
- Right: Breitbart, Daily Caller, Daily Wire, Drudge Report, Fox News, National Review Online, Newsmax, Project Veritas, The Blaze, WorldNetDaily.
- Extreme Right:
- QUESTIONABLE fact checking:
- Left:
- Left Centre:
- Centre:
- Pro-Science:
- Right Centre:
- Right: Daily Mail, National Enquirer.
- Extreme Right: American Renaissance, Daily Stormer, Gateway Pundit, VDARE.
My remarks:
Those rated as MIXED or LOW are “for entertainment purposes only” since they are all lower than Snopes and the Wikipedia in terms of fact checking. In my own experience, I have come to grief using some of them as sources. They cannot be trusted blindly. Since there are plenty of more trustworthy outlets, there is little point in wasting time on them.
Those rated as HIGH or VERY HIGH can generally be trusted when stating facts, but not when stating opinions, like in editorials, blogs, or guest interviews. Their bias comes mainly from wording and in what they choose to report or not report. Some have blind spots, like on Gaza, or think in terms of racist stereotypes.
I did not come across any outlets MBFC rated as Extreme Left, though maybe there are some.
MBFC does not rate itself, but presumably sees itself as being in the centre with HIGH fact checking – like what it rated Snopes and The Economist.
I would not take its ratings as gospel truth, but as a good starting point.
– Abagond, 2017, 2018.
Update (November 15th 2018): The National Review Online has dropped from HIGH fact checking to MIXED.
Update (December 11th 2018): Newsweek has dropped from HIGH fact checking to MIXED and has moved leftward from Left Centre to Left.
Update (December 15th 2018): The Weekly Standard has moved from Right Centre to Right, but did NOT support Trump. It has just announced it is closing down.
Update (December 27th 2018): Vice moves up from MIXED to HIGH fact checking, the Daily Mail moves down from MIXED to QUESTIONABLE.
Update (June 25th 2019): Politico moves rightward from centre left to centre.
Update (August 24th 2019): NPR’s fact checking has gone from HIGH to VERY HIGH. I checked it because they seemed suspiciously soft on David Koch, the billionaire Republican donor.
See also:
- Media Bias/Fact Check
- media guides
- US cable news
- fake news
- propaganda model – for US news outlets
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Abagond 
High fact checking or not, I have serious issues with most of the media outlets on this (supposed) center left group:
“ABC News, ACLU, Al Jazeera, Atlanta Black Star, Axios, Baltimore Sun, Boston Globe, CBS News, Chicago Tribune, FiveThirtyEight, Global Post, Haaretz, Harper’s, Heavy, Houston Chronicle, Human Rights Watch, LA Times, Miami Herald, Mic, NBC News, New York Times, Newsweek, NewsOne, NPR, PBS NewsHour, Politico, RationalWiki, Sky News, SPLC, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The independent, The Intercept, The Real News Network, The Week, Time, Washington Post, Wired.”
For example:
ABC News – jingoistic, Trump sycophants who claim to have “breaking news” every day. They often run the same story for days. Many of their stories are presented with little or no context. Highly sensationalistic.
Human Rights Watch – NGO Industrial Complex corporate shills. Dollar Bill Ya’ll.
New York Times – helped legitimate lies about Black people like, the Black achievement gap exists because Black children believe education “makes you White” and other assorted nonsense. As a premier global paper of record they helped the Bush administration lie to the American people (and the world) about the case for war against Iraq.
NPR – They are so fearful of losing funding, they will say anything the Think Tank complex throws at them.
SPLC – They labeled non-violent Black groups “identity extremists” long before the FBI cooked up that hot mess.
The Real News Network – unfocused. They also pulled a “Black Window Dressing” bait and switch scheme when they launched. They had lots of Black staff and commentators in the beginning to add to their “street cred”. They dumped them after they gained a bit of audience.
Washington Post– Terminally biased.
I could go on….
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pls forgive my alleged syntax i believe i learned about
‘/r/quarantinelist’
and ‘/r/whitesarecriminals’ today
also jfk trump bihsed up today i believe ‘your fired’ if you are the president and so called self reported have no choice bye cheeto
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i dont grok /reddit whatnot that all is something like after yahoo nothing really flappy i think twitter may be a little more um chronologically relevant or temporally something
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like usenet became a zombie
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also, again, we have ‘100 years of lynching’ it’s from what i can tell without like reading it, a bunch of things from the old wow the big machine you look at the old newspapers through in the library cant remember the name its just a bunch of news articles it apparently maybe be germaine? (sp)
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microfiche i think it is, pretty sure
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Where does the BBC fit in all this? They are generally very neutral and honest. God bless those colonizing bastard Brits, but they seem to have developed a news outlet truer to the facts better than most of the biased world.
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BBC is left-centre apparently
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eh, the bbc is my main news, it used to be cnn for national stuff, but, i wouldnt say rt but certainly the guardian is up there, they have a sort of ‘hopper’ for the JFK stuff, so does the bbc, eh conservative, left but fairly moderate, the bbc, i would say, i’m not into all that tories and labour blah blah its enough over here
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sorta vapid in, you know, not landing on one side or another, lately? but they publish details there is a delay on cnn eg the vegas rifle guy shooting at the country music show
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those british folks sure do some reporting
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Abagond and everyone: What do you think of a site like Quora i am on the fence about it’s reliability as a source for checking facts it is questionable to me?
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BBC is more highbrow than American TV news. They still have foreign bureaus and report on global issues.
They don’t deliver the new with as much sensationalism. Most American TV reporters resemble carnival barkers instead of serious news reporters.
That being said, they are far from neutral or honest. They hawk the same lies that American media does like, Venezuela is run by a dictator. They are tied to the same “official sources” that run Washington, London, Paris, Ottawa and Brussels.
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and Tel Aviv.
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@ Abagond
Yes, the tail that wags several dogs.
Neat trick, eh?
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With Russian trolls all over the internet how do we know what’s fake news and what’s not?
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i think they got a little longer leash at bbc rather than cnn, going up a level, it is afp, reuters, ap, getty, and then? i’m not sure
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@MB,
I think you should use Quora only for entertainment purposes. So much of the posting is factually wrong (or at least exceedingly biased), but it is good to see different viewpoints on the same issue. And occasionally someone might express something in a very clear way that you might find valuable.
The other possible useful purpose is to see what your actual friends post on. It may give you an idea of what you can ask your friends about personally.
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@jefe: Thank you your assessment of Quora makes sense. Thank you for your response.
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@ jefe
To go off on a slight tangent, over the years I’ve noticed how the Internet’s changed in regards to finding factual, accurate information. A couple of decades ago, finding accurate info wasn’t all that difficult due to the sheer number of bonafide scholars, researchers, librarians and experts who were busy using the Internet not just to build repositories of online knowledge, but also to share that knowledge amongst one other and the world in general.
This might sound a bit Eternal September-ish, but it wasn’t until the general public started using the Internet as a general form of entertainment that disinformation started becoming a major problem. Although you could never completely trust any online source (and my college professors would never let us students do something as lazy as cite Wikipedia – the encyclopedia that anyone could edit – as a source), you didn’t have to worry about a source potentially being 100% false.
Today, we have a disinformation campaign designed to spread so much doubt about the veracity of anything online that it becomes utterly useless as a trusted source of news and information. Perhaps it’s something that’s always been going on in the background, only for the Russians and the various Reddit/chan edgelords to finally highlight it for the average person.
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@Mack Lyons
I think it is still there, but you have to pay for it. The free stuff is just entertainment, or at best edutainment.
Otherwise you have to go to the libraries and universities to find out the info.
It is a shame that large online media conglomerates have to either follow the line of their party backers, or turn into clickbait to get more clicks. It is difficult to distinguish between clickbait and actual news. It seems that you get a better result if you actually pay for news.
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The BBC in October 2017:
Man from Uzbekistan kills eight people in New York: “terror attack”
White man from US kills 58 people in Las Vegas: not a “terror attack”.
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@ Mary
I agree with Jefe that Quora is not a good place for fact checking, though you might find stuff there to look into further.
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The president got just what he needed to distract from the current news cycle dominated by the Mueller probe and he jumped on it. Of course, he had very little to say about white male gun owners after Paddock’s rampage…
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Update: The National Review Online has dropped from HIGH fact checking to MIXED.
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In my experience both Fox News and the National Review have gone downhill with the rise of Trump.
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I noticed that there has been quite a bit of movement since this post was first done.
The degrading of National Review to “Mixed” is recent though.
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/intro-to-the-media-bias-chart/
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@ Abagond
“…both Fox News and the National Review have gone downhill with the rise of Trump.”
Hmm, curious.
You would think they would be a the height of their powers under a fascist POTUS.
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Update: Newsweek has dropped from HIGH fact checking to MIXED and has moved leftward from Left Centre to Left.
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@ Afrofem
When I say they have gone downhill, I do not mean in terms of audience size or political influence, but as trustworthy sources of information. Under Trump they have become more nakedly propagandistic.
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@Abagond: You need to check out The Intercept
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I enjoy The Intercept’s podcast Deconstructed with Mehdi Hasan. An Vox’s Explained Today podcast.
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Update:
Vice moves up from MIXED to HIGH fact checking,
Daily Mail moves down from MIXED to QUESTIONABLE.
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Update: Politico moves rightward from centre left to centre.
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Update: NPR’s fact checking has gone from HIGH to VERY HIGH. I checked it because they seemed suspiciously soft on David Koch, the billionaire Republican donor.
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