What’s the Bias of AllSides?

What’s the bias of AllSides? AllSides Headline Roundups were rated Center (0.43) by people across the political spectrum in the Aug. 2023 Blind Bias Survey.

The rating of Center was extremely consistent — every bias group, gender, and age group rated AllSides as Center on average. 

We often see groups rating the same news outlet differently. For instance, in the June 2023 Blind Bias Survey, Democrats and Independents rated Fox News as Right, while Republicans gave a rating of Lean Right. Bias is truly in the eye of the beholder — but when it comes to AllSides, it seems Americans agree.

The blind survey result means AllSides meets its own Blind Bias Survey criteria for AllSides Balance Certification™. An outlet is on its way to qualifying for Balance Certification if it achieves a score between -0.9 and +0.9 in a Blind Bias Survey. 

We obviously can’t run an Editorial Review and grant ourselves the certification — we’d be biased ourselves! — but we’re happy Americans rated us as being well within the Blind Bias Survey criteria for Balance Certification.

AllSides rates itself as having a Mixed bias, a special designation we give to outlets that are specifically and transparently designed to curate diverse perspectives. We won’t be moving ourselves to Center, as we still feel Mixed is the best way to describe us, but we’re also pleased with the results.

Why Ask Americans to Rate Us?

AllSides doesn’t conduct original reporting, but we do have a news operation — our team of editors and news curators publishes Headline Roundups every day. We write original summaries of news stories and write original headlines. So, we wanted to know — how would Americans rate the bias of AllSides Headline Roundups? What about our story choices? Do we meet our own standards for balance?

As it turns out, we do. AllSides was rated Center on average across all partisan groups — Democrats, Independents, and Republicans — as well as among those who rate their own bias as Left, Lean Left, Center, Lean Right, or Right. 

In order to avoid any bias on our part when running the survey, the AllSides bias team did not inform the news team that this survey was happening. The news team conducted business as usual while the bias team secretly collected survey content from our balanced newsfeed. We also took other steps to avoid bias, which you can read about in the survey whitepaper. 

AllSides regularly runs blind surveys to determine how Americans perceive political bias in news coverage. We strip all the branding out of the news content so the respondents aren’t swayed by their preconceived notions of a brand’s bias. They’re rating news content only — not their perception of a brand. For instance, you may be certain that Fox News is Right, but what if you were just reading their news content without knowing it was Fox? Would you still think that? This is what the survey captures.

We’ve done Blind Surveys on countless outlets — from Associated Press to Fox News to NBC to OAN. Blind Surveys only present respondents with a small snapshot of content, so we pair the surveys with non-blind Editorial Reviews, conducted by a multipartisan team of reviewers trained to spot bias. We’re constantly running bias reviews in order to keep up with all the changes among editorial teams as well as our political landscape, which is always reflected in news coverage (AP for instance, shifted around the time Trump was elected and has remained Lean Left overall. If we only looked at AP once, we’d miss these changes.)

We believe Americans should know the political bias behind what they’re reading. If you do, too, please consider becoming a Sustaining Member of AllSides to support media bias transparency and our balanced news operation.

Want to help rate media bias? Sign up here to receive AllSides Blind Bias Surveys.