Progressive podcaster Hasan Piker is angry at Ad Fontes Media.
The company, which scores and evaluates the political bias and reliability of media outlets and personalities, put out a new chart earlier this month, and the backlash has been swift, with Piker and Taylor Lorenz both loudly criticizing the company on X for their placements on the chart.
See their posts here:
The company has previously been in the crosshairs of conservative media and politicians, so this was perhaps a bit of welcomed/useful criticism.
Why This Matters:
Ad Fontes is different from some others in media measurement or verification in the sense that it offers this chart and explicitly focuses on “media bias,” which most would characterize as a difficult metric to objectively quantify. Still, directional rankings like this — even if not perfect — have their place for advertisers or media-buying platforms.
But it’s hard not to squint and wonder what makes the Daily Mail or Fox News more worth supporting — they’re closer to the middle — than Jezebel or The Briefing with Jen Psaki. You immediately see how they’re positioned relative to each other, with outlets that end up toward the edges potentially seen as less worthy of ad dollars versus those that are in the middle or closer to it. That might not be a fair way to look at it, but it’s an obvious lightning rod for that reason, hence the blowback from Piker and Lorenz.
We would also say that negatively highlighting — because that’s the nature of being placed on the edges — a publication called Black Agenda Report, just from an optics POV, even if you don’t know anything about the publication itself, seems weird, if not bad. (Why include a Black-centered publication when others could have been included on the chart?)
Experts React:
Some other interesting reactions to the chart from X:
Our Take:
The chart is Ad Fontes’ calling card, but you have to wonder if it’s more of a gimmick these days. The company does more ratings and scoring beyond the chart, while the blunt pyramid itself forces comparisons between outlets that aren’t really apples to apples. Moreover, trying to distill a massive, sprawling, multichannel news ecosystem into a simplistic chart seems bizarre. (Consider that 1-in-5 Americans today get their news from TikTok.)
Ad Fontes itself acknowledges the chart’s limitations. In a blog post, the company notes that over 97% of the sources it has rated aren’t included in it because “they just won’t fit.” Fair enough, but if the format requires leaving out nearly everything you rate, you have to wonder how useful the chart really is.
