SBSQ #23: Does the media really have a liberal bias?
It's a tough call when you consider Fox News. Plus, teasing our new NFL model with Patrick Mahomes — and my poker player rating system.
This is edition #23 — the Michael Jordan/LeBron James edition1 — of Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions. Paid subscribers can leave questions for SBSQ #24 in the comments down below.
We’ve gotten somewhat off-track from the usual SBSQ timing around the first of the month. Honestly, September’s going to be like that too, because I’m hoping to launch our new NFL model, which I’m calling ELWAY2, in advance of the season start on Sept. 5. I think I’m on track to do that — I’m about 60 percent done with the work — but it’s going to be a busy couple of weeks.
To leverage this, one of the questions below is about the NFL — and then there are two other questions that have absolutely nothing to do with it. But I think they’re a really fun trio and they all have detailed answers:
When Fox News is so big, can the media really have a liberal bias?
Is Patrick Mahomes declining?
What is Main Character Mode, and how did Michael Mizrachi employ it to help him crush the World Series of Poker?
When Fox News is so big, can the media really have a liberal bias?
Brad H asks:
Question for SBSQ #23: Does the mainstream media really still lean left? This statement, generally taken as gospel, seems out of bed with a number of 2025 realities. The most important example to me is Fox News, which has been the most popular cable news channel for more than two decades. Dominating cable news for 20 years surely qualifies Fox to have shifted the "mainstream" instead of still lying outside of it. Additionally, Twitter/X is no longer a liberal echo chamber. Are there other examples for or against a shift away from a left leaning media?
I would be very interested in seeing a data-driven analysis of what media the average American interacts with, and what the "lean" of that media might be in 2025.
Brad makes some good points. I am going to attempt a data-driven answer on this, but let me start by articulating a few priors.
As I discussed in the Stephen Colbert story, the media climate has notably shifted. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X and Jeff Bezos asserting more editorial control of the Washington Post are important factors. (There aren’t that many news outlets that matter.) And by the way, while it’s not a perfect indicator, the fact that nearly all the politics Substacks that have blown up since the election are left/liberal/Democratic instead of from the “contrarian” center probably tells you something, since this can be responsive to unmet demand from readers.
However — and this probably deserves its own essay — media operates on tight margins, and is more demand-driven than supply-driven, more often operating downstream from political trends than causing them. If there’s a desire for coverage that flatters someone’s political views, someone or something is going to fill the gap, whether it’s the mainstream media or social media. I will acknowledge this one is complicated and operates more at long time horizons than in the short run. Circa 2019-2020, nearly every center-left mainstream media outlet3 went through internal “reckoning” of some kind. On certain issues, there was a gap between what the audience wanted, what journalists really believed, and what was getting published. Since then, there has been a major backlash to that, mirroring overall political trends — but probably some degree of overcompensation.
Defining the “mainstream media” is hard. My take on it is what I call the Indigo Blob. On the one hand, there’s a large mass of news outlets that fall somewhere toward the center-left, where a lot of the college-educated audience willing to pay for quality news lies. The Indigo Blob contains an ambiguous mix between straight-down-the-middle reporting and Democratic-leaning partisan slop. The counterweight is that there’s a smaller but still quite sizable group of explicitly partisan, right-wing outlets, only some of which maintain a pretense of editorial standards.
It’s easy to cordon off an outlet like Newsmax from the “mainstream media”. But that’s harder to do with Fox News. Any network that’s on at airports and so dominates the ratings has to qualify as mainstream. And with Fox, there’s some ambiguity — a deliberate strategy to blur the distinction between these categories. Their polling department is very good and plays it straight down the middle, for instance, but they share a building with Sean Hannity and the other opinion hosts.
Overall, Fox’s role in the media has become underrated. A certain type of liberal commentator loves to complain about how the New York Times is too right-wing. I don’t really buy this at all, but even if you do, Fox News has been a much more important force for pulling politics in a rightward, Trumpian direction.
As promised, though, Brad, I actually am going to bring you some data here. Pew Research has polling on what percentage of Americans “regularly get news” from a couple dozen news outlets. The list undoubtedly isn’t perfect — it ignores social media, along with video and most podcasts, for instance4 — but let’s run with it.
Fox News ranks first on their list. The harder part is where to rate these news outlets on a left-right scale. I have some very detailed opinions about this — I read news all day, every day. For instance, the Times and the Post have frequently swung back and forth between more liberal and more centrist phases and I could detail for you when I think these shifts occurred. But I don’t entirely trust myself and it’s probably good to hedge toward the conventional wisdom. So I asked 4 AI models — ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini and Grok — for their opinions. (Large language models aren’t great at everything, but they are good at summarizing consensus opinion from what they read on the Internet.) In the ratings you’ll see below, I gave two-thirds of the weight to the LLMs and the other third to my personal ratings.5
You’re welcome to debate the rating for individual outlets, and some like Joe Rogan are admittedly hard to quantify.6 But the broad categories7 ought to be pretty reliable. A lot of news outlets, like my former employer ABC News, fall right on the boundary between “centrist” and “somewhat liberal”. They are smack dab in the middle of the Indigo Blob.
With Fox News, conversely, neither I nor the models think they can get away with being described as merely “somewhat conservative”. Still, if you sort through the audience ratings, they’re #1. Then you get a bunch of Indigo Blob publications. Then you get some smaller ones that are even more conservative than Fox. Let’s pull this data into another chart to get a look at the shape of this: