All news is biased. It’s not the bias that is the problem, it’s the not knowing what the bias of your source is. Ad Fontes, which is Latin for to the source, evaluates over 1200 sources using a “a rigorous, reproducible methodology – and a politically balanced team of analysts – to rate that content, both for bias and for reliability.” If you’re interesting in getting into the weeds, they provide a description of that methodology here.
All Sides
This site collects articles and puts them side-by-side labelled by their bias. It’s a good way to see how the same story, and sometimes the same facts can be covered differently.
FactCheck.Org
This site researches and reviews stories themselves. They’ve traditionally focused on politicians but have covered the controversy around all things COVID as well as race relations in recent years. As for their process:
“We closely monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by the president and top administration officials, as well as congressional and party leaders. However, we primarily focus on presidential candidates in presidential election years, and on the top Senate races in midterm elections. In off-election years, our primary focus is on the action in Congress.”
Learn all about their process here: https://www.factcheck.org/our-process/
Politifact
This site takes fact checking further than just the traditional media but verifying or debunking things found on social media too. Sometimes a claim isn’t entirely true or entirely false. So they came up with their own rating system:
- True
- Mostly True
- Half True
- Mostly False
- False
- Pants On Fire!
The Federal Trade Commission has created a series of fact sheets to help you avoid a few of the most commons scams. We’ve linked to both the English and Spanish versions below.