ATLANTA—Scripps News has hired Ad Fontes Media, a tech company that rates the news for bias and reliability, to audit its national news.
The agreement is part of the network’s commitment to providing accurate, nonpartisan journalism and comes at a time when advertisers are struggling to filter through a deluge of low-quality journalism that can pose brand safety risks.
Ad Fontes uses human analysts paired with AI technology to rate over 10,000 news and informational websites, TV shows, YouTube channels, and podcasts on bias and reliability, plus over 100,000 articles each day in near real time.
“Scripps News’ unbiased, fact-based journalism is what sets it apart from misinformation, AI-manipulated content, and clickbait that has flooded the information ecosystem,” said Kate O’Brian, president of News. “The partnership with Ad Fontes Media will ensure that readers and advertisers can be confident in the reliability of our award-winning work.”
“Our ratings show that Scripps News is producing high-quality journalism, and this new enhanced audit agreement will give advertisers and the public an independent, third-party confirmation of that and with it an even more compelling reason to trust their products,” said Vanessa Otero, founder and CEO of Ad Fontes Media. “Advertisers tell us they need more precise information at the content level to identify quality news from the toxic content that is polluting the internet. We are proud to be working with Scripps News to provide reliable insights that give advertisers the guardrails to return to news and take advantage of the very attractive audiences that it routinely delivers.”
Scripps News scores in the middle—in terms of bias—on Ad Fontes’ Media Bias Chart. It is also rated high for reliability, in the “Reliable Fact Reporting and Analysis” category, the companies reported.
The agreement with Scripps News will allow for Ad Fontes to undertake a more granular audit of content across Scripps News’ TV and digital news portfolio using Ad Fontes’ two-tiered system. The company’s news rating methodology combines 60 highly trained human raters—one third of whom are self-identified as left-leaning, one third center-leaning and one third right-leaning—who work in teams of three. Their state-of-the-art AI news rating tool has been trained on four years of human rating data, the company said.
“The simple truth is that there’s no other content vertical that can deliver growth to advertisers like news,” said Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer with Ad Fontes. “News audiences are more affluent, more likely to take vacations abroad and more highly educated than any other cohort, and helping advertisers take advantage of that will deliver incremental business value for them and strengthen the fourth estate in America.”
The agreement is part of a larger push by Scripps to ensure that it offers unbiased news. Earlier this month, Scripps News launched the Disinformation Desk, a team dedicated to exposing sources of disinformation and examining how it spreads.
