About Liberal and Conservative Media Bias and Baselines

We all have biases. That’s good. Having biases toward and against things and people is an unavoidable part of being human. It’s why diversity and inclusion is important. The blind men and the elephant folk tale from India is a great illustration of how our biases can lead us to believe we have the truth and others are wrong. It’s a reminder that all of us are regularly wrong, and we need others’ perspectives to discover our “truth” is only our perspective—not the complete reality. To know what an elephant truly is requires diverse experiences.

While we need each other’s observations, we also need to be wary of the information we take in. President Ronald Reagan’s “trust, but verify” admonition comes to mind. So does the balancing perspective of Anatole France’s quotation, “If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” Misinformation and disinformation (aka propaganda) have always been with us, but I don’t recall a time it’s ever been as common as it is now. We need to be open to and thoughtful about others’ perspectives.

Last year, I wrote a post called How Biased is the News? and mentioned the book UnSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (the founders of factcheck.org) and the website Ad Fontes. As U.S. politics becomes increasingly partisan and untethered to truth, I’d like to offer some additional insights from them.

One of the spin techniques from UnSpun that’s stuck with me is manipulating baselines. It’s easy to distort perception by changing the baseline factual measurements are made from. A recent example of this is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) which locks in tax cuts that were supposed to expire at the end of this year.

Per Taxpayers for Common Sense’s article “How Much Does a Budget Baseline Matter“, “the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT)—Congress’s nonpartisan tax scorekeeper—released its revenue estimate of the bill using a ‘current policy’ baseline, as directed by the Senate Budget Committee. Under this current policy scenario, all the expiring tax provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) are assumed to be automatically extended—even though they were explicitly set to expire at the end of 2025. This game of smoke and mirrors is being used to mask the bill’s true cost. The result: a misleading score of just $442 billion over ten years that dramatically understates the cost of the OBBBA.” The article goes on to say that if the current law baseline (i.e., the 2017 tax cuts expire at the end of 2025 and tax rates return to the higher 2016 levels) is used rather than the current policy baseline then “OBBBA’s revenue loss balloons to $4.2 trillion—nearly ten times the current policy score, and $400 billion more than the House-passed version.”

Baselines Apply to More than Budgets

Years ago, a friend of mine recommended I watch what he considered to be a neutrally politically biased show on FoxNews called the O’Reilly Factor. I watched the show and within 15 minutes determined the show had a definite conservative bias and wasn’t as fair and balanced as my friend claimed.

When it comes to gauging a media outlets’ trustworthiness and bias, I often go to the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. The chart displays media outlets’ news value and reliability and their political bias as determined by Ad Fontes. The site’s Methodology page explains how Ad Fontes assigns the ratings given for each content piece reviewed from a media source. Part of their methodology is to have each content piece reviewed by a “pod” comprised of a self-identified liberal, centrist, and conservative reviewer. The three reviewers separately evaluate each piece then discuss their individual ratings to agree on a pod-assigned rating.

On August 4, 2025, I took these screen shots of Ad Fontes’s Interactive Bias chart:

Given Ad Fontes’ transparent methodology, journalistic background, and consistency with my carefully self-examined perceptions, it’s become my most used tool to determine how reliable and biased each media outlet is.

Conservatives often complain about mainstream media’s liberal bias. The Ad Fontes chart supports their view. Figure 2 is a detail of the top part of Ad Fontes chart showing what it considers the most newsworthy and reliable media outlets. Notice substantially more outlets are on the political left than right.

Liberals’ complaint that conservative media is often unfair or misleading is also true, based on the greater number of media outlets shown in Figure 4 compared to Figure 3.

Shifting Baselines

I sometimes wonder to what extent personal bias baselines influence my and others’ perception of media sources. I wonder whether my friend who thought the O’Reilly Factor show on Fox was fair and balanced would place the 0 (Middle or Balanced Bias) mark of the Ad Fontes political bias scale somewhere around its current 9 (Skews Right) (Figure 5). If he did, that would cause the columns labels to shift to the right as well and left leaning media outlets currently shown in Figure 3’s Middle or Balanced Bias column would then appear in the Skews Left or Strong Left columns. My friend considered himself a moderate conservative but, given his perception that mainstream media like broadcast news (ABC, CBS, NBC) were strongly liberal, I think he was further to the right than he thought he was.

Similarly, liberals need to be aware our political bias baselines are probably not accurate either. I think my instinctive political bias baseline is around -7 (Skews Left), rather than 0 (Middle or Balanced Bias) on the Ad Fontes chart (Figure 6). That means I need to remind myself that outlets such as the PBS News Hour and 60 Minutes actually fall into the Skews Left labeled column, rather than the Middle or Balanced Bias column that my biased perception often has them under. It also means Wall Street Journal stories are generally less biased, since they fall under the Middle or Balanced Bias columns, rather than the Skews Right column my personal political bias perceives them as.

We all have biases. As I wrote above, that unavoidable and actually a good thing. Those biases give us different perceptions of the same thing. We need to remember, however, that like the blind men, none of us sees the whole picture and we need diverse perceptions to bring us all closer the truth. It’s important to know reality, because conflict winners write the history, scientific laws always determine the consequences.