Ad Fontes Media (2025)

12/09/2025

📆📰Last week President Trump signed an executive order changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, calling it a “secondary” name for the department since an official change requires congressional approval. Our analysts rated media coverage about the name change in our Topic of the Week.

The most balanced reporting from our content set came from an article by USA Today and a video from DW News. The article includes the history behind the Department of Defense, which was originally named the Department of War, as well as comments by Trump and new “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth about why they supported the name change.

The video from the DW News YouTube channel gives the facts behind Trump’s order and explores the reasons why. The host interviews someone from the Atlantic Council, who analyzes Trump’s previous statements and his record of avoiding military engagements abroad. Both the article and the video were found to be a “mix of fact reporting and analysis” with “middle/balanced” bias.

Articles from PJ Media and Raw Story were found to be “analysis” with opposite bias ratings. PJ Media focuses on the facts of the department’s name change and states, like Trump, that ever since the name was changed to the Department of Defense in 1947, “there has also been a shift in policy and a lack of major victories in war.” The article’s author applauds the new name, stating, “As bringing back the Department of War is a part of the Trump administration’s move to make our military stronger, tougher, and more intimidating, it is a welcome change.” Analysts gave the article a “skews right” bias rating.

Meanwhile, Raw Story’s reporting includes criticism of the name change from military and legal analysts, who call it “complete idiocy,” “a pointless distraction” and “another slap in the face delivered courtesy of TRUMP.” Analysts noted that the article includes only negative reaction to Trump’s order and gave it a “skews left” bias rating.

A video clip from the Fox News program “Jesse Watters Primetime” scored slightly lower than these two articles, receiving a bias rating of “strong right” and a reliability rating of “opinion.” Watters agrees with the change to Department of War, stating, “In the Cold War we played defense. Now we have to bring back what worked. We are going back on offense.” Watters also expressed support for other recent U.S. military actions, concluding that all of these actions send a message: “No one’s taking us seriously with sinkholes at the White House and drag queens in camo,” Watters says. “We’ve been stuck in endless wars against Muslims and let the Chinese and narco-terrorists sneak up and pump our cities full of poison. And now it’s time to make them react to us.”

The lowest-rated reporting in our content set came from an article by Wonkette, which states, “Nothing sadder has ever happened, nothing more pathetic, nothing less manly, nothing more insecure” than the name change to Department of War. The author concludes the move will make the entire world laugh at the U.S.: “This is how you get lions and lambs to lay down together to laugh at the US military with the stroke of one little tiny flaccid pen.” The article includes many instances of profanity and insults, leading our analysts to give it a “most extreme left” bias rating and a reliability rating of “selective or incomplete/unfair persuasion.”

05/09/2025

📆📰 Cracker Barrel announced last week that it’s returning to its old logo after critics, including President Trump, criticized their rebranding efforts. In a post on its website, Cracker Barrel said it will keep its old logo, which features an older man in overalls (“Uncle Herschel”) sitting next to a barrel and the words “Old Country Store.” Our analysts examined media coverage about the proposed changes at Cracker Barrel in our Topic of the Week.

The most balanced and fact-based coverage from our content set came from articles by ABC News and BBC. Although both articles give some basic facts behind Cracker Barrel’s logo change and subsequent reversal, our analysts found that the reporting shied away from directly discussing facts around the biggest main cause of what it calls “backlash” — specifically, that posts made by social media influencers on the right gained massive attention online.

The posts harshly criticized Cracker Barrel and attributed their logo change to left-wing ideologies. The articles included social media posts from President Trump criticizing and then praising Cracker Barrel without acknowledging the social media furor that led to him weighing in on such a topic in the first place.

Further, both the ABC and BBC articles pointed to such shallow rationales for why the logo change prompted backlash that they omit a critical part of the story, which is that an angry social media culture war ultimately led to the company reversing course. For example, the ABC article asserts that it was due to “some social media users questioning whether it indicates a departure from Cracker Barrel’s roots and others critiquing the modern design choices.”

The BBC article quotes a PR expert who said, “What they did wrong is they went against their brand story, which was the old logo, that reflected the southern, whimsical atmosphere in the stores.” These euphemistic characterizations result in incorrectly describing what the backlash actually was.

Our analysts have noticed that some large news outlets, in trying to be “unbiased,” sometimes do so by simply not talking about political aspects of an inherently political story. However, this practice can lead to omitting important facts, or in this case, using such extreme euphemisms for what happened that it leads a reader to believe something that is not entirely the case.

So although these stories were indeed of “minimal/middle/balanced” bias, their lack of facts surrounding the social media conflicts lowered the reliability scores out of our highest fact-reporting tiers into the “analysis or other issues” tier. In this case, the score was because of these “other issues.”

A better way for a news outlet to cover a political story with high reliability while limiting bias is to increase the density of facts in the story. There are many facts a journalist could include in this story without characterizing them in a biased way. The other articles in this Topic of the Week indicate what some of those facts are.

A video from The Bulwark YouTube channel also was rated as “analysis” with a “middle/balanced” bias. Though the reliability score is similar to the ABC and BBC articles, this score reflects that it is “analysis” rather than “other issues.”

In the video, two Bulwark contributors express frustration with the right’s reaction to the Cracker Barrel’s proposed logo, calling it the latest “cultural flash point” from the right. The video analyzes the changes to the Republican party in general since Trump has taken office, calling the right the new “PC police” who needs to “assert dominance”: “We need to be able to tell everybody what to do and what to think,” the host says.

The bias of an article from Daily Kos is evident in its headline: “Cracker Barrel just keeps caving to MAGA’s bigotry.” The article focuses on Cracker Barrel’s recent removal of its webpage affirming DEI and LGBTQ rights, stating that “right wingers labeled the chain’s rebrand as ‘woke’” and criticized anything related to “their archnemesis: diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Analysts labeled the article as “opinion” with a “strong left” bias.

A video from the Benny Johnson YouTube channel begins with an image of the Cracker Barrel logo that puts President Trump in place of the iconic “Uncle Herschel.” Johnson calls Cracker Barrel’s CEO a “woke girl boss, feminist, aging boomer lady” who is “trying to remake an American heritage brand in her own woke image.”

He says the company’s decision to cancel the new logo following criticism from Trump is a “victory” that demonstrates “the cultural power of President Trump.” “We win! Freaking great,” Johnson proclaims. Analysts placed the video in the “selective or incomplete/unfair persuasion” category of reliability and found it to have a “hyper-partisan right” bias.

The lowest reporting from our content set came from the Breitbart website, whose article begins like this: “After a week in a barrel of its own making, the woke crazies who colonized Cracker Barrel have reversed course on a number of dreadful decisions, including a child-grooming, gay pride page on its website.”

The main inaccuracy throughout the article is the assertion, in the title and otherwise, that content on Cracker Barrel’s site was about “grooming” children — an accusation that the site’s content was preparing children for exploitation including sexual assault. Though the term “groomer/grooming” has become more widely used in low-reliability content, usually on the right, in describing many things related to the LGBT community, it is a serious accusation with a specific meaning, and here it is not supported by any evidence.

Analysts also noted several insults in the story, which is written in a first-person perspective by John Nolte, who says that allowing kids at Pride events is “a demonic attempt at shattering their innocence through grooming.” Nolte criticizes “dumb companies” for hiring “woke elitists” who destroy their brand. As a result, the article scored in the “contains inaccurate/fabricated info” range with a “hyper-partisan right” bias.

04/09/2025

💻📰 Web/Print Chart, Sep 2025, Simple Version
We have data on more than 4,300 news and information sources included on the chart. That’s a lot of valuable information about the reliability and bias of various media outlets. But including that much data into a single chart image has its challenges.

Over the years we’ve heard complaints that the chart is too crowded and the source logos are too small, making the chart difficult to read. Last September, by request, we released our first “simple” Media Bias Chart® that contained some of the major web, podcast and TV/video sources in one image. Because it was so popular, we’ve opted to do that again this year, but instead of one chart, we’re releasing three: one for web sources, one for podcasts and one for TV/video sources.

Today we’re releasing the simple Media Bias Chart® for websites. (The simple podcast and TV/video charts will be published later this month.) Remember, in order to make the logos as large and as readable as possible, we have magnified a portion of the chart and removed the sections around the edges. That means that we have omitted any sources that fall entirely within the “Most Extreme” right and left bias categories and the “Contains Inaccurate/Fabricated Info” reliability category.

We’ve fully rated 2,700 websites, but this simple Media Bias Chart® features only 37 sources of them (find a list of those 37 here). You can download a free, licensed version of this simple, magnified Media Bias Chart® for websites here!

Here’s a list of the sources that fall within the green box on this chart. Our analyst team has found that these sources are generally reliable and minimally biased:
AP
Ballotpedia
BBC
LA Times
Newsweek
Quillette
Reason
The Center Square
The Hill
The New York Times
USAFacts
Wall Street Journal
Washington Post
WIRED
World News Group
Yahoo News

These simple charts do help with visibility, but they don’t help us to solve the question we get most often — people who are looking for a particular source, and it’s not included on that month’s chart image. As I said before, we’ve rated thousands of sources, and we have to select only a few dozen of them to put on each static chart in order to keep it readable.

30/08/2025

On Aug. 12, the White House sent a letter to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Lonnie G. Bunch III, informing him the Trump Administration “will be leading a comprehensive internal review of selected Smithsonian museums and exhibitions…to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”

Exactly one week later, President Donald Trump posted the following to social media: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” Our analysts rated media coverage of these announcements in our Topic of the Week.

The least biased piece in our content set came from The Art Newspaper. This article gave some background about the funding and governance of the Smithsonian but was mostly “sharp rebukes from groups spanning the museum field to free-speech organisations” who believe the Trump Administration is trying to “police Smithsonian programming.”

However, our analysts did not believe these criticisms were political in nature and came more from a belief the Smithsonian should be able to operate free from any political interference, whether from the left or the right. Our analysts found this article to be simple fact reporting with minimal bias.

The only other item our analysts rated that made it into the fact-reporting range was an article from The New York Times. Our analysts spent more time discussing this article than anything else in our content set. The author of this article interviewed numerous artists and museum curators from around the country to see how they changed their programming due to Donald Trump’s re-election to the presidency.

All of our analysts agreed that it was a well-researched piece that showed high effort on the part of the author. However, the headline (“As Trump Targets the Smithsonian, Museums Across the U.S. Feel a Chill”) and framing of the criticisms against the Trump Administration were more biased compared to The Art Newspaper article.

One of the people interviewed in this article said “the chilling effect [of the Trump Administration] on museum programming struck at the heart of artistic experimentation and the historic role of art to occasionally provoke strong reactions in viewers.” The author noted “[i]n previous years, museums were cautious not to upset progressive audiences…[b]ut nowadays, museums are worried about the reaction from conservative audiences.” Our analysts rated this article as a mix of fact reporting and analysis with strong left bias.

In the New York Post, anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss wrote, “[President] Trump isn’t trying to ‘erase history,’ he’s looking to reverse a woke movement that has indeed rewritten the American story to highlight suffering rather than providing a balanced picture of our past.” In a video that accompanied the article, Weiss said the Smithsonian is “overly focused on this one negative aspect of our history, slavery, as opposed to taking a look at all the great things that we have in our history.”

In the article, she also said, “Trump’s criticism that the Smithsonian is overly focused on slavery is not unreasonable: In nearly every exhibit, critical race theory in general, or slavery specifically, makes an appearance,” but she provided little evidence to support this claim, which lowered the article’s reliability score.

She also wrote, “There’s no mention in either of the American Indian Museums — in NYC or DC — about slavery practiced by Native Americans,” but our analysts noted that while these museums may not have a dedicated permanent exhibit solely focused on Native American slavery, they have engaged in scholarly and public programming on the topic. Our analysts found this article to be opinion with material facts not independently corroborated, with a strong right bias.

On The Glenn Beck Program, Beck and Stu Burguiere discussed Trump’s post to social media about the Smithsonian and the reaction to it. Beck said if “you want to tell the story of slavery, tell both sides of slavery, not just the horrors of slavery, but the miracle of those who were White, who stood up and tried to stop it…[Slavery]’s not the story of America. It is one of the stories of America that, thank God, we fought. We’re the only country in mass where one race of people fought and died for the freedom of another race of people.” Our analysts rated this video from Beck’s YouTube page as opinion with a strong right bias.

On NPR’s Morning Edition, host Michel Martin interviewed Nikole Hannah-Jones, who produced The 1619 Project, and asked for her reaction to Trump’s social media post and his past criticisms of The 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones said Trump’s “criticism [of the Smithsonian] is baseless…to say that any museum, but particularly the National Museum of African American History and Culture, spends too much time focusing on slavery means that you don’t actually want a real, authentic depiction of the American past.”

On The 1619 Project, she said, “We are taught that this is a nation founded on freedom. That’s true. We were also founded on slavery, and we’ve only wanted to deal with one of those histories.” Our analysts rated this interview as a mix of analysis and opinion with bias that is slightly strong left.

Finally, our analysts rated a video from The Lincoln Project’s YouTube page. In the video, Rick Wilson was also responding to Trump’s social media post. Wilson said Trump was “complaining about the Smithsonian and saying that all they do is complain about how bad slavery was. Let me be very clear about something. If you are defending slavery, you are losing…if you are defending slavery, you are an absurdity, not a president.”

Wilson also said “Donald Trump has certainly never been to the Smithsonian. He has never engaged in the process of going to a museum where history is portrayed in the good, the bad, the ugly.” However, our analysts noted Trump had previously visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. This inaccurate statement, along with Wilson’s conflation of Trump’s complaint about the Smithsonian overemphasizing slavery with a defense of slavery, lowered reliability. Our analysts rated this video as unfair persuasion with aslightly hyper-partisan left bias.

Want to see if you agree with our analysts? Find the articles and videos examined by our team on the Topic of the Week page of our website. https://adfontesmedia.com/topic-of-the-week-trump-criticizes-smithsonian/

22/08/2025

📆📰 On August 11th, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring a public safety emergency due to crime being “out of control in the District of Columbia.” The President invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 to place the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia (MPD) under direct federal control. The President also called up 800 D.C. National Guardsmen to assist the MPD.

Our analysts rated four articles and two videos that took a closer look at President Trump’s decision in our Topic of the Week.

In three of the four articles our analysts rated, journalists from across the political spectrum shared personal stories of their own experiences with crime in our nation’s capital and their thoughts on President Trump’s approach to dealing with this issue.

The most minimally biased article in our content set came from journalist Josh Barro and his Substack newsletter, Very Serious. Barro moved to D.C. in 2008 and in his newsletter he analyzed crime in D.C. since he arrived in the city. Barro is skeptical of Trump’s approach to dealing with this problem and advocates for Democrats to acknowledge that crime in Washington, D.C. is a real issue for which Democrats can offer alternative solutions, like filling the judicial vacancies in the D.C. federal courts and giving money to the MPD, so they can hire more police officers. Our analysts found this article to be a mix of analysis and opinion.

Our analysts rated an article from New York Times’ columnist Maureen Dowd as a mix of analysis and opinion with bias that skews slightly to the left. Dowd, who was born and raised in D.C. and still mostly lives there today, wrote this column while her sister was at D.C. police headquarters to report on her car that was stolen in D.C., later found in Maryland in less than ideal conditions, cleaned and detailed and then promptly T-boned while parked. Like Barro, Dowd believes Democrats make a mistake by not acknowledging the issue of crime in Washington, D.C., but says Donald Trump is not the right person to address this issue because “Trump is playing the savior on crime when he’s the biggest scofflaw in town.”

Writing in The Spectator, Isaac Schorr recounts his “brush with death in D.C.” when a stray bullet hit his windshield as he was stopped at a red light while driving in Washington, D.C. Schorr believes presidential intervention to address the crime problem in D.C. is long overdue and is grateful for any attempt by the federal government to deal with the issue of crime in D.C. Schorr says “Washington, D.C. is a city with endless potential and should be a point of pride for all Americans...Yet for years now, it has been the modern model of corrupt, complacent governance – a national embarrassment that no one seemed to care enough about to try to fix.” Our team found this article to be mostly opinion with some minimal analysis and bias that skews right.

The final article in our content set comes from the Associated Press (AP). The AP article gives some historical background information about Washington, D.C.’s unique status as a federal district and what the D.C. Home Rule Act allows and explains what actions the President took in regards to the MPD and the D.C. National Guard. The AP article cited MPD statistics stating violent crime in D.C. in 2024 reached its lowest level in 30 years, but our analysts noted the AP failed to mention the veracity of this data has come into question, as the MPD suspended a police commander last month while it investigates allegations that he falsified crime statistics in his district. This lowered the reliability score and increased the bias score of this article, but our analysts found this article to be a mix of fact reporting and analysis that is minimally biased.

The most biased items in our content set came from the two videos that were rated this week. On the left, our analysts rated a clip from the The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Maddow suggests that Trump has deployed the D.C. National Guard because “he really enjoys using U.S. military force against American civilians on American soil and wants any excuse to do it anywhere he can.” Like the AP, Maddow cited MPD recent statistics about violent crime falling in D.C., but our analysts again noted she did not mention the accuracy of this data is now disputed. This lowered the reliability score and increased the bias score of this video. Our team found this video to be opinion with strong left bias.

On the right, our analysts rated a video from BlazeTV’s YouTube page taken from The Glenn Beck Program as opinion with bias that skews right. In the clip, Beck and Stu Burguiere discuss their unequivocal support of President Trump’s decision to take control of the MPD saying he has the “absolute right to do it.” Beck suggests Trump’s approach to lowering crime in D.C. is similar to what
Rudy Giuliani did as mayor of New York City in the 1990s through his "broken windows" policy focused on cracking down on minor crimes, such as vandalism and subway fare evasion, to prevent more serious crimes from occurring. If Trump is successful in reducing crime in Washington, D.C., Beck believes residents of the District will be so pleased Trump “actually has a chance of turning D.C. Republican.”

15/08/2025

📆📰 President Trump surprised reporters last week when he appeared on the White House roof. He answered questions shouted by the media as he got a bird’s eye view of renovations he’s planning on the grounds, including construction of a 90,000-square-foot ballroom. Our analysts rated media coverage of the event in our Topic of the Week.

ABC News and UPI provided the most minimally biased and fact-based coverage from our content set. Both articles describe Trump’s appearance on the roof and the answers he gave to media questions about his planned construction projects on the White House grounds. Our analysts found the articles to be “simple fact reporting” with “middle/balanced” bias.

Articles from Daily Caller and New Republic were found to be “analysis.” The Daily Caller article uses Trump’s appearance on the roof as proof that he will take media questions from “just about anywhere,” comparing Trump’s relationship with the media to President Biden’s during his presidency. The article was rated with a “skews right” bias.

The New Republic article recounts Trump’s day, which began with him spinning a “web of lies” about labor statistics and later appearing on the White House roof, where he oversaw plans to bring his “‘dictator chic’ design taste to the People’s House.” The article compares Trump’s appearance with that of President Carter, noting that unlike Carter, Trump “was sure to make himself the center of attention.” Analysts gave the article a “skews left” bias rating.

The two videos in this week’s content set were rated as much lower in reliability, falling into “selective or incomplete/unfair persuasion.” On his YouTube channel, Benny Johnson narrates other video clips showing Trump walking around on the roof. Johnson says Trump has “made good on his promises to reinvigorate the White House.” Trump said that he was “building nuclear missiles” on the roof, an apparent joke that Johnson’s video and its headline implies is fact. The video, which begins with an AI-generated clip of Trump dancing on a courtroom table, was given a bias rating of “skews right.”

Meanwhile, Keith Edwards says on his YouTube channel that Trump “has lost his mind” and is building missiles on the roof after recently “sending nuclear missiles to Russia.” Edwards asks, “Does this make you feel safe?” He describes a gesture made by Trump while he “wanders” on the roof as “Nazi-ish” and ends the video by speculating that Trump wants to run for a third term as president. Analysts found this video to have a “strong left” bias.

The left and right examples this week illustrate a key concept--that how "left" or "right" a piece of content is can be independent of how reliable that is. That is, content can represent left or right perspectives, but higher reliability content makes its case with better facts and arguments than lower reliability content from the same side.

12/08/2025

💻📰📺📼🎧🎙It's the Biannual Media Bias Chart!
Ad Fontes Media’s new flagship Media Bias Chart® is a guide to help you choose healthy sources of information and to break out of your filter bubble. We live in a polarizing political and news environment, and it’s important to keep your news diet healthy while also consuming news from a variety of sources and viewpoints.

The flagship Media Bias Chart® is a static JPG or PDF infographic that includes sources from various types of media all in one image, and it’s released only twice per year, in January and August. During the rest of the year, we produce monthly charts that are specific to web/print, podcast/audio and TV/video.

With each chart release, the questions we get most often are about which sources are the “best” — the least biased and most reliable to give you verifiable facts. In order to help you determine that at a glance, the Media Bias Chart® is divided into different colored sections.

Sources in the green section of the chart are the fruits, vegetables, and lean protein — the ones we’ve found to provide fact-based, reliable and minimally biased or balanced information for a healthy news diet.

Sources in the orange and red sections are the candy or junk food — the ones we’ve found to contain unfair, false, or misleading information and/or extreme bias. They can be very satisfying to consume but are generally unhealthy, especially if you’re having candy for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Sources in the yellow section are like bread and pasta — they can be heavy with analysis and opinion, and they will fill you up with information, but one cannot live on bread alone. We suggest caution and additional inspection of sources in the yellow section, for various reasons.

The content may vary widely in reliability (for example, some episodes of a podcast may be highly reliable and other episodes less so). Or the source may have high levels of bias even though their content is generally reliable. So remember, use caution when consuming information from sources in the yellow section of the Media Bias Chart®.

To maintain a healthy news diet, we encourage you to try out the sources in the green box, even if you haven’t consumed them before. Relying on these sources for information regularly will make you a healthy and informed media consumer.

Some of them have a bias to your opposite political side, because the green box includes sources with a “skews left” or “skews right” bias. Being exposed to reliable, but minimally biased content from the “other side” can help keep you from getting stuck in a filter bubble. And it can help you to have meaningful conversations with friends and family who may not agree with you politically.

This flagship chart contains a total of 132 sources: 92 from web/print, 20 podcast/audio and 20 TV/video programs. It includes a mix of national, international and local sources. We know it can be difficult to see the individual logos, so a list of all sources on the flagship chart is available here.

Keep in mind that these are only a sample of the thousands of sources our team has fully rated (2,690+ websites, 800+ podcasts, and 800+ TV/video programs!). We’ll be back with monthly charts for web, podcast and TV/video sources in September.

Ad Fontes Media

12/09/2025

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04/09/2025

30/08/2025

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