Ad Fontes Media (AFM)

• Goals
  • Describe AFM
  • Find the rating of a media source using AFM

Ad Fontes Media (What)

Ad Fontes Media (AFM) is an organization that ranks media sources (e.g., CBS, NYT, Fox, Wall Street Journal, and so on) based on their accuracy and their bias by using a systematic process that involves skilled raters who span the political spectrum.

Rationale

AFM is worth using for several reasons:

• You can easily get a list of the highest quality news sources.

  • If you skim these, you can get an accurate and unbiased view of current events.
  • An AVR (Accurate view of reality) is super useful.

• It provides a quick way to check the quality of most news sources.

• It rates both accuracy and bias which highlights the importance of both of these concepts.

• The rating of news sources is based on a systematic measurement method applied by a spectrum of people with different political viewpoints—not on getting people’s opinions.

One concern I have is that I doubt that people who consume biased and inaccurate news will believe the AFM ratings. However, the AFM site goes into great detail on their rating method.

AFM (How To)

The AFM Website presents the details of how to find the rating of a news source. Here is my summary.

Principle: Get your news from sources that are credible. These sources have an AFM rating of 40 and above for reliability and bias scores that are close to center.

1. The easiest way is to google “ad fontes rating X”, where X represents the source you want to know about. For example “ad fontes rating CBS news” links to the Ad Fontes Website rating. This rates the CBS News (website) as 42.03 for reliability and -2.71 for bias. Thus, this is a credible source.

2. AFM also presents an interactive media chart. There is a great deal of information on this chart.

3. My advice is to get a list of high quality news sources and get your news by skimming these sources. This list can be generated from the AFM site in just a few minutes.

History of AFM

Ad Fontes Media, founded in 2018 by Vanessa Otero, is a public benefit corporation based in Colorado that promotes media literacy and combats misinformation. Its mission is to “rate all the news to positively transform society.”

Prior to starting Ad Fontes, Otero was a practicing patent attorney. She was frustrated because misleading, untrue, and polarizing media content was driving us apart. So she launched Ad Fontes Media as a public benefit corporation based in Colorado. AFM is a for-profit business.

Ad Fontes is Latin for “to the source,” because they analyze the source of news, which are the news articles themselves.

The Media Bias Chart

The signature feature of AFM is an interactive chart (Fig 1) that shows media sources and ranks them by reliability on the vertical axis and bias on the horizontal axis.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the Media Bias Chart

To use the media bias chart, go to Interactive Media Bias Chart | Ad Fontes Media. Then you can scroll, zoom, and so forth. If you click on an icon, you can see the rating of the organization as shown in Fig 2.

How Ratings are Done

I copied the following from the AFM Website. The website has much more detail.

Sources

Overall news source scores are generated based on scores of individual articles. Each article is rated by at least three human analysts with balanced political viewpoints: one who self-identifies as right-leaning, one as center-leaning, and one as left-leaning. Sometimes articles are rated by larger panels of analysts for various reasons.

For each news source, we pick a sample of articles that are most prominently featured on that source’s website over several news cycles. We typically have at least 15 articles rated per web source, but for larger sources (such as the New York Times and Washington Post) we have over 100 articles in our sample. We rate all types of articles, including those labeled analysis or opinion by the news source, and the dominant factor for how we select articles from a page is prominence.

Each overall source score is a weighted average of the individual article scores. Our weighting algorithm captures the effect that individual articles with low reliability or high bias have on overall perceptions of the news source.

Articles

Each analyst has gone through extensive training on Ad Fontes Media’s rating methodology, which is based on content analysis of articles.

Each analyst rates each article on three individual reliability sub-factors of 1) Expression, 2) Veracity, and 3) Headline/Graphic, and then the analyst gives the article an “Overall” reliability rating. Each of these ratings is on a numerical scale between 0-64, with 0 being the least reliable and 64 being the most reliable.

Each analyst also rates each article on three individual bias sub-factors of 1) Language, 2) Political Position, and 3) Comparison, and then the analyst gives the article an “Overall” bias rating. Each of these ratings is on a numerical scale between -42 (left) and +42 (right).

The analysts’ scores are then averaged, and the average score is shown on the chart.