Keep The Ad Fontes Media Chart Away From Your Kids (Community Edition)

We don't love the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart, and we have our reasons — which we posted on TikTok last week. (Watch below.)

But our community has been weighing in all week —?and it turns out the chart wouldn't even pass a high school statistics class. And some of the people telling us this are high school students themselves!

(And that's pretty terrible, because Ad Fontes is selling its product into high schools and public libraries.)

Here's what the Ad Fontes Media Chart gets wrong:

1. It uses a logical fallacy to even out the chart

False balance is when journalists present two sides of an argument equally despite the evidence heavily supporting one side.

This muddies up reality, since people think both sides are backed by facts — even when one isn’t. The argument starts to look like a difference of opinion, rather than fact against fiction.

Ad Fontes's chart does the same thing: it presents disinformation outlets and news outlets as two equals. That's false balance —?because one side is clearly telling lies. (Remember: Which side did the election disinformation narrative come from?)

That means Ad Fontes is out here playing politics, rather than telling us the truth.When you

2. You can’t have multiple factors on an axis

You learn this in high school. Each axis can only represent one factor. But the Ad Fontes Media Chart is marching to the beat of its own drum. Its Y-Axis maps “News Value and Reliability.” Those are two separate things, which immediately breaks the chart.

3. The chart is wildly subjective

Try to follow along with this —?we dare you:

• The Y-axis runs the spectrum from “fact reporting” to “contains inaccurate/fabricated info.”
• "Analysis” is placed below "fact." (Analysis isn't less reliable than fact —?it's usually rooted in fact.)
• This is followed by opinion “or wide variation in reliability.”
• “Propaganda” sits above outlets that "contain misleading information".

There are so many competing factors sitting on a single axis that the chart can't even get the basics right.

Don't believe us? Ad Fontes has Russia Today, a Kremlin-backed propaganda outlet and mouthpiece for Putin sitting under "Skews Left" instead of the category in which it obviously belongs: propaganda. (Amazingly, its founder tweeted this out AFTER Russia officially invaded Ukraine.)

4. You really see the Overton Window at work

The Overton Window is a concept that describes how increasingly extreme views can be absorbed as normal over time.

In the United States, we're especially vulnerable to this because we define so much of our discourse as "right", "left" and "center." But tight, left and center are descriptors that aren't rooted in a clear definition. Therefore over time, the terms become more and more meaningless and frankly, they can mean whatever you want them to mean.

That's why calling for the eradication of transgender people or forcing young girls to carry out pregnancies are not considered "extreme" anymore —?but just "conservative."

Normalizing hate and bigotry as "conservative" is not just inaccurate, it misinforms both advertisers and high school students!

5. The "multi-analyst" approach is rooted in nonsense terminology

Does being "pro-gun control" and "pro-LGBTQ" rights make you a leftist? Are you a conservative if you're "pro-choice" with a "Blue Lives Matter" bumper sticker on your car?

People and politics are more complicated than dots on an X-axis. That's why the terms "moderate", "left" and "center" are meaningless in practice.

Ad Fontes doesn't get that. They have their "analysts" self-identify based on a list of categories long enough that they could reasonably be "left" on some issues, "right" on others and "moderate" on the rest.

At some point, you just pick a label and go with it.

In conclusion

A meaningless chart with meaningless words that has Russia Today labeled as a lefty news outlet? You get what you pay for. So please...do not buy.

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Nandini Jammi is co-founder of Check My Ads, the adtech watchdog. ?? Follow us on TikTok!