Media Bias, Visualized

News watchdog Ad Fontes Media has released its latest “Media Bias” chart, an attempt to map the political leanings of a wide array of publications onto the left-right axis.

• Sites like Fox News and the New York Post fall into the “strong right” category, opposite their lefty counterparts such as Vox and the web edition of MSNBC.

• Per Ad Fontes, sites like NBC News, the Washington Post and CNN are more down the middle, with only a relatively slight skew toward the left.

Ad Fontes’ takeaway: Web/print news sources are the most trustworthy and least biased, with 79% of analyzed sources landing in the most reliable category. On the other hand, podcasts and TV/video are much less reliable and more prone to bias.

Related: A new study from the left-leaning organization Media Matters has found that podcasters—especially of the right-wing variety—are absolutely crushing it.

The numbers: Of the 320 ideological programs analyzed by Media Matters, right-leaning shows have five times more followers than their left-leaning counterparts and account for 82% of total followers across YouTube, Rumble, Twitch, Kick, Spotify, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

• Right-leaning programs are expanding beyond the political space, with 42% self-identifying as comedy, sports, or entertainment.

• In the 2024 election, Donald Trump reached 23.5 million people per week via podcasts and streams, compared to just 6.4 million for Kamala Harris.

Ad Fontes Media and Media Matters are, in a way, illustrating the very problem they’re trying to diagnose. Liberals—especially the highly educated progressives who steer the Democratic Party—are busy nerding out on charts, breaking down metrics, and trying to intellectualize their struggles to connect with voters. Meanwhile, conservatives are out there making content that actually resonates with people on a gut level. There’s nothing wrong with being data-driven—analysis is important. But voters aren’t just data points; they’re people with emotions, instincts, and personal experiences.

A worrying new analysis from Financial Times chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch finds that people today aren’t any less intelligent, but distractions and digital habits are making it harder to apply that intelligence effectively.

Cognitive decline: OECD’s PISA test reveals that reading, math, and science scores have been dropping since 2012—often more sharply before COVID than during the pandemic.

Falling numeracy skills: 25% of adults in high-income countries (and 35% in the U.S.) now struggle with using mathematical reasoning to assess the validity of statements.

Declining reading habits: In 2022, the share of Americans who read a book in the past year fell below 50%, signaling a shift away from text-based learning.

Squint and you start to see the signs of an intellectually degraded populace everywhere—dumbed-down, lowest-common-denominator content, a political climate where debate has been replaced by tribal screaming, public spaces that feel more chaotic and dysfunctional. It’s not that people are less intelligent—we just aren’t using our intelligence the way we once did. The only silver lining, as Burn-Murdoch points out, is that our brains are still fully capable. We’re just failing to live up to that potential.

For nearly 70 years, the U.S. was the world’s agricultural powerhouse—exporting more food than it imported. That era may be over, Bloomberg opinion columnist Javier Blas suggests in a new analysis.

The numbers: The U.S. is running its third straight agricultural trade deficit in 2025, with a $50 billion gap between imports and exports.

• America has lost its top wheat and soybean exporter status to Russia and Brazil; Argentina is gaining on U.S. corn.

• Farm commodity prices have dropped 50% since 2022, tightening margins for farmers.

What happened? American farming was already facing headwinds before President Trump, but trade wars, rising costs, and aggressive foreign competition have turned up the heat.

Farmers were one of Trump’s strongest voting blocs—more than 75% of voters in rural, farm-dependent counties backed him in 2024. But his latest trade war is putting that support to the test. New tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada—America’s top agricultural buyers—could mean another round of lost export markets and tighter margins, just like in 2018. And it’s not just farmers feeling the strain. Auto workers are watching steel costs rise, small businesses are bracing for higher import taxes, and industries reliant on migrant labor could take a hit. Trump’s coalition has weathered a lot, but policies like these could create real tensions in the groups that have backed him the hardest.

A few years ago, big cities were bleeding residents—now, they’re growing again, according to new Census Bureau data.

The numbers: Metro areas grew by 3.2 million people from 2023 to 2024, outpacing national growth at 1.1%.

• One major caveat: Immigration drove most of the surge, adding 2.7 million people to cities, compared to just 600,000 from births.

• The Sunbelt is still booming—9 of the 10 fastest-growing metro areas were in the South, with Florida leading the pack.

Immigration is propping up urban growth, but with a new administration cracking down on border policy, what happens if that spigot gets cut off? Meanwhile, the Sunbelt’s continued rise suggests the core reasons people left cities—high costs, long commutes, and housing shortages—haven’t gone away. Are these numbers a real rebound, or just a temporary shift?