How we rate outlets
Rules, examples and a change log. Last full review: September 2026.
Every outlet in The Analyst has a political-lean rating, a factuality rating and an ownership category. They are our own editorial assessments of each outlet as a whole (not of individual articles). They are not copied from, licensed from, or endorsed by any other rating organisation, and no outlet can pay to influence its rating. We list 427 outlets: 379 news outlets and 48 opinion or commentary sources, in 75 countries.
What this is, and is not
- A judgment, not a formula. One editor weighs the signals below; there is no scoring formula and no panel. Treat a rating as one informed opinion.
- Not a fact-check of any story, and not a claim that an outlet is right or wrong.
- Uneven spectrum. Of the news outlets, 25% are left, 50% center and 25% right of center; the center is the largest group. 5 state-controlled news outlets are listed separately and are not counted in these shares. The right of center was widened in October 2026, but the list only includes outlets with a usable public feed, so it is a sample, not a census of the media.
Political lean: five points
Signals we look at: (1) the positions of its editorial and opinion pages; (2) which stories it chooses to cover and how it frames them; (3) whose voices and sources it uses; (4) the language of its headlines; (5) how it and its owner describe themselves publicly.
| Far Left 12 news outlets | Consistently advances positions at the far left end of the scale, in its news framing and story selection as well as its opinion pages. On our five-point scale this is the outer end (comparable to "Left" on other charts); it does not mean extremist. Examples in our list: The Intercept, Jacobin |
| Leans Left 82 news outlets | Its news reporting is broadly professional, but story selection, framing or sourcing tends to favour the left, and/or its editorial and opinion pages clearly do. Examples in our list: NPR, The Guardian, The New York Times |
| Center 187 news outlets | Neither side's framing consistently dominates. Typical of wire services, public broadcasters and outlets with a strict wall between news and opinion and balanced sourcing. "Center" does not mean "correct". Examples in our list: BBC World News, PBS NewsHour, Deutsche Welle (DW) |
| Leans Right 58 news outlets | Its news reporting is broadly professional, but story selection, framing or sourcing tends to favour the right, and/or its editorial and opinion pages clearly do. Examples in our list: National Review, Fox News |
| Far Right 35 news outlets | Consistently advances positions at the far right end of the scale, in its news framing and story selection as well as its opinion pages. On our five-point scale this is the outer end (comparable to "Right" on other charts); it does not mean extremist. Examples in our list: Breitbart News, The Daily Wire |
For the coverage bars we group these into three buckets: Left (far left and leans left), Center, and Right (leans right and far right). The counts above do not include the 5 state-controlled outlets described next.
State-controlled outlets
Some outlets are the voice of a national government rather than independent newsrooms. We list them separately and label them State-controlled. The test is: owned or directly operated by a national government and its editorial line is set by that government. Public-service broadcasters that have statutory editorial independence (for example the BBC, PBS, NPR, DW and France 24) do not meet it and are not labelled; their ownership type is Publicly Funded.
State-controlled outlets stay in the directory, their feeds are still read, and their lean, factuality and ownership ratings are unchanged. What differs is how they are counted: on a story card they are listed and tagged State-controlled, but they are not included in the left / center / right percentages or in the number of sources behind the bar, and they never create or remove a coverage gap or a balanced-coverage label. A story that only state-controlled outlets carry has no bar. The same outlets are left out of the shares quoted on this page and on the welcome page.
Currently labelled (5): CGTN (China), Mehr News Agency (Iran), RT (Russia), Ukrinform (Ukraine), Zambia Daily Mail (Zambia). Think an outlet is labelled wrongly, or should be? Use the dispute form below and say why.
Factuality
| High 257 outlets | A strong record of accurate reporting, a visible corrections policy, and clear sourcing standards. |
| Mixed 158 outlets | Accurate reporting alongside sensationalism, spin, or notable errors that were not always corrected. |
| Low 12 outlets | Frequent inaccuracies, or a record of publishing claims later shown to be false. Check anything important against another source. |
Ownership
| Media Conglomerate 130 outlets | Part of a large, multi-outlet media company. |
| Publicly Funded 33 outlets | Funded mainly by a government or public licence fee (an independence policy may still apply). |
| Independent 132 outlets | Owned by its founders, staff or a small company, not by a larger media group or a single wealthy owner. |
| Private Individual 23 outlets | Owned or controlled by one person. |
| Non-Profit / Foundation 104 outlets | Owned by, or mainly funded by, a non-profit or foundation. |
News and opinion are kept apart
Opinion sections and commentary sites have their own feed and never count toward a news story's coverage bar. Neither do state-controlled outlets (see above). A story is a coverage gap only when at least 3 independent voices among the rated news outlets covered it, at least 50% of those voices lean one way, and no more than 22% lean the other. It is a center gap when at least 3 independent voices covered it, center-rated outlets are 60% or more of them, and both the left and the right are 22% or less.
Syndicated copies count once
Outlets on the same side that ran an identical headline (ignoring case, punctuation and a trailing outlet name), or that belong to the same named syndication network, count as one independent voice. The 3-voice minimum and every percentage are applied to those voices, not to the number of outlets. A wire story that eight outlets print word for word is eight outlets but one voice. The same headline on two different sides still counts once on each side. Nothing is merged because headlines are merely similar.
Named syndication networks currently tagged in the outlet list: States Newsroom (15 outlets). A tag is added only where the outlet's own description names the network. This rule applies to stories as they are computed. Gap of the Day pages that were already published keep the numbers they were chosen with and are never recalculated.
How ratings are reviewed
Ratings are reviewed on a rolling basis. The directory shows the month each rating was last reviewed. Outlets you add yourself use your rating, and the app says so. If a rating is wrong, tell us below; changes made after a dispute are recorded in the change log with the date.
Change log
- 2026-10-21: Widened financial, business and regulatory coverage. Added 3 outlets, taking the list from 421 to 424 (375 to 378 news outlets): The Wall Street Journal (Markets), rated center, high factuality — a news-side rating only, separate from the WSJ editorial/opinion pages, which lean right and are not part of this feed; Fortune, also rated center, high factuality; and SEC Press Releases, the regulator's own official announcements, rated center like the other government-newsroom feeds already on this site (e.g. NASA) rather than treated as a political actor. The WSJ and Fortune ratings follow the same outside consensus (AllSides and Ad Fontes Media both place WSJ's news section and Fortune in their center/middle category) used elsewhere on this site, and every feed here was fetched live and returned items from the preceding seven days. We also looked for a comparable U.S. Treasury press-release feed and a live feed for The Deal (a mergers-and-acquisitions trade publication) but found neither: Treasury's only working RSS address returns stale, non-news site updates, not press releases, and The Deal appears to have no public feed left at all, its content now apparently sitting behind S&P Global Market Intelligence's product suite — so neither was added. No existing rating was changed; the left/center/right split stays 25% / 50% / 25% of scored news outlets.
- 2026-10-14: Added a separate category for state-controlled outlets: outlets that are owned or directly operated by a national government and whose editorial line is set by that government. Public-service broadcasters with statutory editorial independence (BBC, PBS, NPR, DW, France 24 and similar) are not in it, and neither are privately owned outlets that are merely friendly to a government (for example Daily Sabah). Five outlets are labelled: RT, CGTN, Mehr News Agency, Zambia Daily Mail and Ukrinform. NASA was considered and is not labelled: it is the newsroom of a science agency, not a news outlet with a political line, and it stays a center-rated outlet like any other. They stay in the directory and their feeds are still read, and their lean, factuality and ownership ratings are unchanged. What changed is how they are counted: on a story they are listed with a State-controlled tag, but they are no longer included in the left / center / right percentages, the source count behind the bar, coverage-gap detection or the balanced-coverage label, a story that only they cover has no bar, and they no longer supply a story's lead headline when any other outlet covers it. The shares quoted on this site now leave them out and say how many were set aside; among the 375 news outlets, 94 left, 183 center and 92 right of center now have a share (369 outlets), and 6 are listed separately. Calgary Herald was moved from leans right to center so that it matches the other Postmedia dailies in the list, Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen (both center, high factuality); this was a consistency change and we have not found new evidence of a different editorial line. In the Telegraph entry we removed a sentence about a reported sale that we could not confirm; its ownership category is unchanged.
- 2026-10-14: Widened the right of center, which readers rightly called thin. Added 42 outlets: 32 news outlets and 10 opinion or commentary sources, taking the list from 379 to 421 outlets and from 71 to 75 countries (new: Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Peru). News additions by region: United States 5 (The Epoch Times video feed, The Center Square, The Algemeiner, The Jewish Press, The National Pulse), United Kingdom and Ireland 5 (The Telegraph, GB News, The Sun, City A.M., Irish Independent), continental Europe 10 (WELT, FAZ, NZZ, Die Presse, Svenska Dagbladet, Berlingske, De Telegraaf, ABC, CNews, Do Rzeczy, Magyar Nemzet; these are in their own languages), Australia 2 (Sky News Australia and The Australian, via their YouTube channel feeds because their site feeds are bot-blocked), Israel 1, India 2, Pakistan 1, Japan 1, South Korea 1, Latin America 3 (Gazeta do Povo, La Nacion, El Comercio). Opinion additions: The Epoch Times Opinion, City Journal, Reaction, The Hungarian Conservative, Hudson Institute, The Daily Economy, The Jerusalem Post Opinion, Fraser Institute, Kiwiblog and Politicsweb. The right-of-center share of news outlets rose from 19% (65 of 343) to 26% (97 of 375). These ratings are the editor's assessments, proposed on 2026-10-14 and open to the editor's review and adjustment; every feed was fetched live and returned items from the preceding seven days. Where an outlet was already rated (for example Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen, rated center) it was left as it was. No existing rating was changed.
- 2026-10-05: Added Bloomberg Markets, Bloomberg Business and Bloomberg Technology alongside the existing Bloomberg (politics) feed, so Bloomberg is covered across its main sections. All four carry the same Bloomberg rating; no existing ratings were changed.
- 2026-09-22: Added 8 right-of-center outlets after readers said the right side of the spectrum was thin (OpIndia and Organiser from India, Le Figaro and Valeurs Actuelles from France, Junge Freiheit from Germany, Gript Media from Ireland, and The Western Journal and Conservative Brief from the US), lifting the right-of-center share of news outlets from about 18% to 20%.
- 2026-09-22: Added 33 more outlets in a broader global sweep, reaching 70 countries in total: Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Malaysia, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, several Balkan and Southern European countries, several African countries (Tunisia, Morocco, Zambia, Uganda, Ethiopia), the Caribbean (Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica), and Venezuela and Argentina, plus a UN humanitarian-crisis feed (ReliefWeb). Goal: fewer stories with only one or two outlets covering them.
- 2026-09-22: Added 21 outlets focused on the Middle East, the Ukraine-Russia war and Asia-Pacific (regional wire services, exiled/independent Russian and Syrian outlets, and conflict-monitoring specialists such as the Institute for the Study of War and Airwars), after readers pointed out the War & Conflict feed leaned too heavily on US and Western European sources.
- 2026-09-21: Published the rating method and this change log, and opened the dispute form. Every outlet now shows who rated it and when.
- 2026-09-21: Grew the list from 24 to 300+ outlets. Removed CNN and The Wall Street Journal from the list because their public feeds stopped updating; no ratings were changed.
- 2026-09: First full review of all built-in ratings (lean, factuality and ownership).
Dispute a rating
Think a rating is off? Tell us why. We read every submission and reply if you leave an email. Reasons and links to evidence help most.
Compare with independent raters
These organisations publish their own ratings and methods. We are not affiliated with them: AllSides, Ad Fontes Media, Media Bias/Fact Check.
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