LEFT-CENTER BIAS
These media sources have a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appeals to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information but may require further investigation. See all Left-Center sources.
- Overall, we rate Bing News moderately Left-Center biased, with most stories coming from Left-Center sources. We also rate them High for factual reporting because most sources used are credible media outlets.
Detailed Report
Bias Rating: LEFT-CENTER
Factual Reporting: HIGH
Country: USA
Press Freedom Rating: MOSTLY FREE
Media Type: Website
Traffic/Popularity: High Traffic
MBFC Credibility Rating: HIGH CREDIBILITY
History
Bing News is a news aggregator developed by Microsoft. It is powered by artificial intelligence and is a part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine; and was launched in June 2009. The Bing News homepage breaks the news into categories such as World, US, Business, Technology, Politics, etc. They also offer a search feature to search for news by keyword. The news on the homepage and in searches is derived from Microsoft’s search algorithm.
Read our profile on the United States government and media.
Funded by / Ownership
Microsoft owns Bing News.
Analysis / Bias
Determining the bias of a news aggregator is different from a single source that produces content. The wording on Bing News comes from other sources, so we will not even look at that as a factor. The most logical way to determine the bias of a news aggregator is to look at the sources they use for their news content. Another way to look, since Bing is a search engine, is to see where sources rank when searching for news. We did a limited test of this by searching a variety of keywords such as Migrant, Trump, Clinton, NATO, Mueller, Obama, etc., and the results indicate that in 7 out of 10 (70%) searches, left-leaning sources ranked 1st and ahead of the first right-leaning source. Usually, the right-leaning sources were much lower in rank.
Another method we used was to look at what sources were being used in the categories US News and World News. For three days, we looked at the top 25 sources in each category for a total of 150 sources calculated. We then compared these sources to our bias ratings and calculated what percentage came from each bias category. Overall, most stories on Bing News come from Left-Center sources (69%) and 16% from least biased sources. Further, Right-Center sources only made up 8% of the news and Right-biased 5%. However, Bing News utilized only 2% from left-biased sources. When looking at purely left-leaning vs. right-leaning sources, the numbers significantly favor the left. See charts below:
We are not stating Microsoft is willfully biased; we are pointing out that the sources used have a strong preference for the left. This could be due to how the algorithm works and that there simply are more mainstream news media that lean left.
Overall, we rate Bing News moderately Left-Center biased, with most stories coming from Left-Center sources. We also rate them High for factual reporting because most sources used are credible media outlets. (D. Van Zandt 11/28/2018) Updated (04/01/2022)
Source: https://www.bing.com/news/
Last Updated on April 1, 2022 by Media Bias Fact Check
Left vs. Right Bias: How we rate the bias of media sources
