Media Bias Fact Check Wikipedia

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 16, 2025, 10:10 PM

Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is an American website founded in 2015 by Dave M. Van Zandt.[1] It considers four main categories and multiple subcategories in assessing the "political bias" and "factual reporting" of media outlets,[2][3] relying on a self-described "combination of objective measures and subjective analysis".[4][5] It is widely used, but it has been criticized for its methodology.[6] Scientific studies[7] using its ratings note that ratings from Media Bias/Fact Check show high agreement with an independent fact checking dataset from... Four main categories are used by MBFC to assess political bias and factuality of a source. These are: (1) use of wording and headlines (2) fact-checking and sourcing (3) choice of stories and (4) political affiliation. MBFC additionally considers subcategories such as bias by omission, bias by source selection, and loaded use of language.[2][11] A source's "Factual Reporting" is rated on a seven-point scale from "Very high" down to "Very...

Political bias ratings are U.S.-centric,[11][13] and are "extreme-left", "left", "left-center", "least biased", "right-center", "right", and "extreme-right".[14] The category "Pro-science"[3] is used to indicate "evidence based" or "legitimate science". MBFC also associates sources with warning categories such as "Conspiracy/Pseudoscience", "Questionable Sources" and "Satire".[3] Fact checks are carried out by independent reviewers who are associated with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and follow the International Fact-Checking Network Fact-checkers' Code of Principles, which was developed by the Poynter Institute.[15][11]... These sources have minimal bias and use very few loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appealing to emotion or stereotypes). The reporting is factual and usually sourced. These are the most credible media sources.

See all Least-Biased sources. Bias Rating: LEAST BIASED (0.0) Factual Reporting: MIXED (5.0) Country: USA MBFC’s Country Freedom Rank: MOSTLY FREE Media Type: Organization/Foundation Traffic/Popularity: High Traffic MBFC Credibility Rating: MEDIUM CREDIBILITY Founded in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia is a free-content encyclopedia project based on an openly editable model. Wikipedia’s articles provide links to guide the user to related pages with additional information. According to Alexa Internet, as of September 2018, Wikipedia is the world’s fifth-most-popular website for overall visitor traffic. Read our profile on the United States government and media.

The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation Inc owns Wikipedia. Donations fund The Wikimedia Foundation. Further, Wikipedia runs fundraising campaigns each year on the website. Media bias occurs when journalists and news producers show bias in how they report and cover news. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening of the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article.[1] The direction and degree of media bias in... Practical limitations to media neutrality include the inability of journalists to report all available stories and facts, and the requirement that selected facts be linked into a coherent narrative.[3] Government influence, including overt and...

This can change the distribution of power in society.[6] Market forces may also cause bias. Examples include bias introduced by the ownership of media, including a concentration of media ownership, the subjective selection of staff, or the perceived preferences of an intended audience. Assessing possible bias is one aspect of media literacy, which is studied at schools of journalism, university departments (including media studies, cultural studies, and peace studies). Other focuses beyond political bias include international differences in reporting, as well as bias in reporting of particular issues such as economic class or environmental interests. Academic findings around bias can also differ significantly from public discourse and understanding of the term.[7] In the 2017 Oxford Handbook of Political Communication, S.

Robert Lichter described how in academic circles, media bias is more of a hypothesis to explain various patterns in news coverage than any fully-elaborated theory,[7] and that a variety of potentially overlapping types of... Various proposed hypotheses of media bias have included: This page hosts daily news stories about the media, social media, and the journalism industry. Get the latest Hirings and Firings, Media Transactions, Controversies, and… Fact Check, FactCheck, Least Biased, Original Media Bias Fact Check selects and publishes fact checks from around the world.

We only utilize fact-checkers that are either a signatory of the International… Welcome to our weekly media literacy quiz. This quiz will test your knowledge of the past week’s events with a focus on facts, misinformation, bias,… Fact Check, FactCheck, Least Biased, Original This fact-check may be outdated. Consider refreshing it to get the most current information.

The material provided shows scholarly and journalistic claims that Wikipedia’s English edition exhibits measurable ideological skew, often characterized as a left-wing or pro-Democratic tilt in political topics, with disputes about the scale and causes... High-profile contested entries and editorial governance problems are presented as symptomatic evidence that crowd-based editing and opaque moderation can produce errors, manipulation, or perceptions of partisanship, though the literature also finds that revision activity... 1. Why scholars say Wikipedia leans left — the measurable findings that matter Multiple analyses conclude that Wikipedia articles on U.S. politics tend to be slanted toward Democratic positions relative to expert sources, based on lexical comparisons and citation patterns; this is the core empirical claim in several studies cited [2].

The comparative research finds a quantifiable difference between crowd-sourced entries and expert-produced encyclopedias like Encyclopædia Britannica, noting that Wikipedia’s slant decreases as articles receive more revisions, which implies editorial dynamics matter as much as... These studies frame bias as a statistical property that varies by topic and editorial history rather than a fixed institutional policy. 2. The Andrew Huberman episode — a flashpoint illustrating governance gaps Founded in 2015, Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is an independent website that has promoted awareness of media bias and misinformation by rating the bias, factual accuracy, and credibility of media sources, large and small. Media Bias/Fact Check relies on human evaluators to determine the bias of media sources and the level of overall factual reporting through a combination of objective measures and subjective analysis using our stated methodology.

Dave Van Zandt is the founder and primary editor for sources. He is assisted by a collective of volunteers and paid contractors who provide research for many sources listed on these pages. Finally, MBFC also provides occasional fact-checks and original articles on media bias and publishes daily curated fact-checks from around the world. The mission of MBFC is to educate the public on media bias and deceptive news practices. We inspire action and a rejection of overtly biased media resulting in a return to an era of straightforward fact-based news reporting. Our purpose is to give people the resources and tools needed to understand the bias and credibility of the sources they consume.

The AI era is here. It is everywhere. Most likely, the last news article you read was partially or maybe fully generated with AI. Please note that MBFC does not use AI to generate our bias and credibility ratings. We believe bias is unique to humans and that only humans can accurately determine bias. While AI is a powerful tool with great potential, it cannot replicate a human’s ability to read between the lines and interpret intent.

Sites that claim to use AI to rate bias should be double-checked with a human-based evaluator. We rely solely on AI-based tools like Grammarly to edit our own text, ensuring it is concise and readable. Media Bias/Fact Check funding comes from reader donations, third-party advertising, and membership subscriptions. We use third-party advertising to prevent influence and bias, as we do not select the ads you see displayed. Ads are generated based on your search history, cookies, and the current web page content you are viewing. We receive $0 from corporations, foundations, organizations, wealthy investors, or advocacy groups.

See details on funding. A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter. Is Wikipedia "Wokepedia" as some have claimed? A 2024 paper[1] by Puyu Yang and Giovanni Colavizza sheds some light on the question. It adds to a corpus of research on ideological bias on Wikipedia; some previous studies have found leftist bias and one study found a center-right bias. The authors of the present study (whose previous work includes several papers on Wikipedia citations) had already reported on it in a 2022 preprint (see our earlier review), but it has since been published...

The paper looks at the English Wikipedia's citations to news sources and associates each source with a score corresponding to its political bias. The bias scores come from a dataset called Media Bias Monitor (MBM), described in this 2018 paper. The MBM dataset is based on the propensity of Facebook users to share links to particular sources. For instance, it presumes that if a source is shared more by self-identified liberals than by self-identified conservatives, the source has a liberal bias. Yang and Colavizza find that on a scale ranging from –2 (very liberal) to +2 (very conservative), the average Wikipedia news citation has a score of -0.5, which is halfway between "moderate" and "liberal". Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is a long-running site that catalogs more than 3,900 media outlets and publishes daily fact-check compilations and bias ratings; MBFC says it uses a structured methodology updated in 2025 to...

Academic work has often used MBFC’s ratings and found strong correlation with independent measures like NewsGuard and some fact-check datasets, though the site’s methodology and classifications have also been criticized in scholarly discussion [3]... 1. What MBFC is and what it publishes — a busy media watchdog Media Bias/Fact Check operates as a public-facing database and news site that lists thousands of media sources, posts daily “vetted” fact-check roundups and media-industry items, and offers bias and factualness evaluations of outlets [1]... The site runs frequent items such as “Daily Vetted Fact Checks,” “Media News Daily,” and weekly quizzes to promote media literacy [7] [8]. MBFC also curates fact-checks from other organizations and states it reviews those items before republication [5] [9].

2. How MBFC says it rates outlets — new 2025 methodology MBFC publicly documents a revised methodology introduced in 2025 that it says uses a comprehensive, weighted scoring system to evaluate political, social and journalistic dimensions and to make ratings more systematic and transparent; the... 1, 2025 are subject to that approach [2]. MBFC’s own “MBFC Ratings: By The Numbers” page explains the site’s goal of reducing subjective influence and addresses dataset effects such as a concentration of submitted right‑leaning sources [4]. PolitiFact.com is an American nonprofit project operated by the Poynter Institute in St.

Petersburg, Florida, with offices there and in Washington, D.C. It began in 2007 as a project of the Tampa Bay Times (then the St. Petersburg Times), with reporters and editors from the newspaper and its affiliated news media partners reporting on the accuracy of statements made by elected officials, candidates, their staffs, lobbyists, interest groups and others involved... politics.[1] Its journalists select original statements to evaluate and then publish their findings on the PolitiFact.com website, where each statement receives a "Truth-O-Meter" rating. The ratings range from "True" for statements the journalists deem as accurate to "Pants on Fire" (from the taunt "Liar, liar, pants on fire") for claims the journalists deem as "not accurate and makes... PunditFact, a related site that was also created by the Times' editors, is devoted to fact-checking claims made by political pundits.[2] Both PolitiFact and PunditFact were funded primarily by the Tampa Bay Times and...

Media Bias Fact Check Wikipedia

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