Media Bias Chart (v. 4.0)

Especially given the plethora of news sources that have been birthed by the rise of social media and the ease of access/communication, its become increasingly important that we as news consumers take care in properly educating ourselves on which of these news sources are credible and make sure that we are aware of each of their respective biases. The most important quality is to ensure that articles are parsed for facts and to draw your own opinions and conclusions from them. In this post I'll mostly be talking about the media bias chart published (most recently in August 2018) by ad fontes media, the (first?) most popular rendition of such a news source bias ranking system that I have come across. So let's jump right into it, everyone.

The Media Bias Chart

Compiled by ad fontes media, this media bias chart (pictured below), categorizes the most popular  news sources relevant to residents of the United States by partisan bias and accuracy of reporting. Several sub-charts that rank the shows shown on certain TV networks such as Fox and CNN have been published as well. This subjective chart has garnered a lot of attention since it was first published on the internet and as a result, I took an interest in the veracity of the content being shown. Of course, the first thing that we should ask ourselves is what is the reliability of the source and does the source have anything to gain from publishing this information in this perspective, a slightly opinionated analysis of which is outlined below based on the information made available on ad fonte media's website. 

• The founder of ad fontes media and original creator of the media bias chart is Vanessa Otero, who also currently does all of the content bias analysis and whose bio and that of the advisory board for ad fontes media can be found on their webpage. The site is entirely funded by Ms. Otero and through donations and sales of prints; they make no ad revenue through their site. And although they state on their webpage that they will publish an annual report of all income sources, no such thing has been published as of yet. This would of course make the entire process much more credible and transparent lol. 
• Although there exist outside advisers for the content bias analysis and Ms. Otero expresses an intention to hire a number of others to partake in this process as well, at the moment it is done entirely by herself and is wholly subjected to any personal biases she may attribute to her analyses. All of the rating criteria and the rating sheets themselves are posted and explained extensively on the site, however, and the overall ranked score is an amalgamation of individual article scores that are weighted on the quality of content and the reach (described as popularity and ratings, etc) which are input into an algorithm that is not published. 
• It should be kept in mind that Ms. Otero explicitly guarantees that at least ten articles from each listed source (in the level of the 100s for the most popular sources) have been evaluated to create the ranking score - which is a small sample size in my opinion.
• So far the comments I've highlighted seem a tad critical, but one point I do appreciate is that the rating system that she uses rates each sentence of the entire article on 1.) veracity of the sentence and 2.) the expression or level of opinion included in the sentence. 
• Biases are determined based on "political position", "characterization", and "terminology", and the overall bias is scored in comparison to the different representations of the same topic by other news sources and the way in which the article is presented through its headlines and images to its fan base
• The background, expertise and political stance of guests that are brought onto the graded shows and that of the hosts are also evaluated according to a similar metric.   

tldr: the site and the chart have a lot of room to grow and it seems as if Ms. Otero acknowledges this and has a clear plan and direction for how it should grow. Good as a general guide, but I would still treat it as nothing more than a general guide.