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One morning in November, I logged on for a Google Meet with AllSides, a company on a crusade to fight bias in the media. Henry Brechter, the editor in chief, is twenty-eight; brown hair tufted out of his Red Sox hat. “We’ll try and go around the different corners of the internet,” he said. The team tossed out recent news items: Zohran Mamdani, the long-shot Democratic Socialist candidate, won New York’s mayoral election; Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, announced that she would not run for reelection; a weapons manufacturer was preparing for a theoretical conflict between China and the United States by testing autonomous drone warships in the Pacific. But before getting into the substance of the stories, everyone felt compelled to tell me about their personal political persuasions. 

“I’m from Boston and I have a center bias,” Brechter said. His staff of writers and editors chimed in. Evan Wagner: “I live in DC and I have a lean-left bias.” Beth Hicks: “I’m in Virginia and I’m right-biased.” Emily Allen: “I live in Nashville, I’m originally from Southern California, and I’m left-biased.” AllSides aims to provide “balanced” news: on any given topic, the site delivers a roundup of articles from a range of political perspectives, as interpreted and labeled by the team. Staff members are sought out for variety in terms not only of ideology—employees are quizzed regularly on their political views—but also life experience. Brechter is one of the only staff members with a journalism degree. One staff member is a volunteer firefighter; another is an adjunct English professor. An AllSides editor named Andy Gorel (“center bias”) told me, “What drives our team’s strength is we’re a bunch of normies.”

In the meeting, Wagner said that when he started at AllSides, “there were a lot of times when I would hear an opinion, and like, no offense to any of you, I would say, ‘Oh my God, that’s crazy.’” The crowd cracked up; a few people guessed whose opinions he had in mind. Then he continued: since starting his work at AllSides, he said, “I understand the worldviews of a lot more people now.” His journey is a manifestation of the utopian AllSides dream: the site wants to heal our scarred and atomized nation. “Everyone imagines the demon on the other side of the keyboard,” Brechter told me. But most people arguing online “just want the best for their family.” He described the average AllSides reader as “someone who understands that there’s an issue with the media but is still unsure about who to trust and what to believe.”

The site was established in 2012 by John Gable (right bias) and Scott McDonald (center bias), who met while working at a cybersecurity company called Check Point Software. They realized they shared a serious concern about how tech was transforming media. Gable had been an early employee at Netscape, the Web browser credited with introducing the modern internet to the masses. Looking at the trajectory of the internet, it was as though “our son went off the rails,” he recalled. “Search engines, algorithms, social media: our thinking has been manipulated horribly.” AllSides was meant to be a “disrupter,” he said. “We’re bringing power back to regular people to think for themselves.” And not just people: “Nonprofits, news organizations, government institutions—we can be a tool for them to make better decisions.” 

Their company was an originator in a growing field that believes the problem of bias in media is an existential threat to democracy. Alongside AllSides, which calls itself the “standard for information integrity,” there’s Ad Fontes and News Guard, which rate news outlets on bias. Ground News, Tangle News, The Flip Side, and Freespoke provide readers with articles labeled and analyzed according to their purported political biases. In 2017, Steve Ballmer—formerly the chief executive of Microsoft, now best known for owning the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers and going berserk courtside—founded USAFacts, based outside of Seattle, which delivers “neutral” information sourced from government data. Straight Arrow News—based in Omaha, created in 2021 by Joe Ricketts, the founder of Ameritrade and owner of the Chicago Cubs—has a robust operation, with both reporters who occasionally break news and telegenic on-camera anchors streaming online. “We report down the middle with facts,” the mission statement of Straight Arrow News reads. “Our reporting is delivered to you without bias, filter, or spin.” 

Permeating these companies is a promise of saving humanity from our conspiratorial online disinformation hell. Freespoke is a Web browser extension that returns results presorted by political leaning; the company boasts that while “Big Tech platforms hide opposing views,” its tool presents “all perspectives so you can decide for yourself.” News Guard publishes a metric called the Reality Gap Index, which it calls “the nation’s first ongoing measurement of Americans’ propensity to believe the top false claims circulating online each month.” Their modes and methods vary widely—some are the work of professional journalists, others the projects of serial tech entrepreneurs. Nearly all make use of artificial intelligence.

There is, no doubt, a fertile market for resources that position themselves at a critical distance from the legacy press. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans’ trust in the media has dropped significantly over the past decade. In 2016, 76 percent of US adults said they had “a lot of or some trust in the information they get from national news organizations.” In 2025, only 56 percent said the same. Americans also widely see news organizations as biased: a 2024 Pew poll showed that 77 percent of US adults believe “news organizations tend to favor one side.” 

According to another Pew poll, from 2022, the people making the news and those reading it are dramatically split on the question of whether the news should actually aim for neutrality. When asked whether “journalists should always strive to give every side equal coverage,” 76 percent of US adults said yes; only 44 percent of journalists did. “That’s a real disconnect between the reader and the journalist right now,” Julie Mastrine, AllSides’ director of marketing and media bias, told me. “The reader just wants to decide for themselves.” 

There is something optimistic, or maybe nostalgic, about the deference these bias-tracking companies show news outlets, in their careful cataloguing of journalists’ material. But as sources of news continue to explode—fueled by content creators, partisan chatbots, AI tools, and social platforms’ profit motive to boost extremism—is it possible to filter and grade and measure it all? And who gets to decide what bias is and what it isn’t? Who bias-watches the bias-watchers? “Some of these organizations,” Joan Donovan, a Boston University journalism professor, told me, “are putting themselves in the position of being a referee in a game that has very few rules.” 

Ideas about “bias” in journalism have never been fixed. For most of the eighteenth century, and the first half of the nineteenth, the standard for an American newspaper—say, the New-York Tribune, the voice of the Whigs—was to be a cheerleader for one political party or another. Over the course of the nineteenth century, which saw the creation of the Associated Press, in 1846, and the New York Times’ adoption of the promise, in 1896, “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor,” the journalism industry increasingly embraced objectivity—a selling point in a crowded media market. During the Vietnam War, American media evolved away from that standard, however, and moved toward analysis and interpretation. That, in turn, accelerated widespread accusations of liberal bias, as Matthew Pressman, a professor at Seton Hall and the author of On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (2018), told me. Bashing the mainstream media for its liberal bias “certainly got taken to a new level of vitriol by Donald Trump,” he said, and yet it has been “a staple of Republican orthodoxy” since the sixties. 

Historically, organizations fighting bias have had explicit political leanings: the Washington Journalism Review and (MORE) magazine, both founded in the seventies, attacked the media for its supposed rightward tilt; Accuracy in Media, founded in 1969, and the Media Research Center, founded in 1987, went after supposed leftist leanings. Companies such as AllSides have billed themselves as peace-seeking neutral entities hovering above the fray. Gable came to the work with a background in politics as well as tech: in the eighties, pre-Netscape, he’d worked as a political campaigner for Mitch McConnell and George H.W. Bush. Leading up to the 2012 Obama-Romney presidential race, he felt “disgusted,” he said, by what he saw as the campaigns’ singular focus on “riling up” their bases and a general absence of substantive policy conversations. It was a “whole breakdown in the system,” he told me. AllSides emerged from that frustration. “We were very aware of the problems of division, of how society wasn’t listening to each other,” he said. Then, after a few years, Trump descended that golden escalator, and “the Trump phenomenon made the problem something people in the general public understood.”

In analyzing online news discourse on everything from measles outbreaks to foreign wars, AllSides attempts to break stories down into their component parts. That’s no easy task, and Brechter told me about a tool the team is developing, AllStances, which will use AI to help with the work. “Our system right now—I feel, and a lot of our readers feel—is too confined to the left/right binary,” he said. “So we’re using AI to break out of that.” Built using digital tools from a nonprofit called the Society Library, which seeks to “improve humanity’s relationship to information,” AllStances is being configured to present “all stances” on any given subject in the news. “Maybe ten max,” he said, thinking out loud. “We’d gather and display all available research data, general history, and precedent around different issues and deliver it to users in a way that opens their minds.” Mulling the implications further, he said: “We’ve talked about where to draw the line. That’ll be an interesting bridge to cross. Do we want it to be able to articulate arguments in favor of the most horrible things you can imagine?”

AllSides is a “public benefit corporation,” meaning that the company is “driven by both mission and profit.” It has donors and investors, including Gable—who has poured in millions from his tech fortune—and now mostly generates revenue from client services for companies such as Newsweek, the Associated Press, and Axel Springer, the German media conglomerate that owns Politico and Business Insider. Beyond bias-rated news aggregation, AllSides offers an array of services including editorial-bias workshops and roundtables for “politically diverse” people to “discover our shared humanity.” The team will even audit your newsroom for bias: news organizations that pass get a trademarked “AllSides Balance Certification.” According to Brechter, AllSides has “several million users per month” across its site, social media channels, newsletter, and app; the company is proud of the fact that, according to surveys it regularly conducts, its audience is evenly split among readers on the left, the right, and in the political center.

“Truth does not solve the problem of misinformation,” Gable told me. “Human psychology and our ability to talk to each other is at least as important as the information itself.” He sees AllSides’ potential as world-changing. “Our mission is to free people from filter bubbles so they better understand the world and each other,” he said. “To really solve that issue, it’s a lot more than news. It’s about all information”—as in, the internet as a whole, from advice on the treatment of life-threatening illnesses to the best place in Topeka to get pancakes, from how to vote in a presidential race to how to vote on a school board election. “In all free societies, we don’t know what to believe anymore,” he said. “AllSides has evolved to address that universal problem. We have checks and balances” to gauge bias in news. “That’s what AllSides wants to do for the entire information ecosystem.”

Companies such as AllSides operate on the lofty belief that any topic can be broached neutrally—that there is a middle where people can meet, if only someone would help them locate it. When I asked Brechter about the challenges of achieving that ideal, he acknowledged that it’s a tall order: “The über-passionate on either side,” he said, “they see the other as completely delusional.” And yet it’s an ethos that remains central to most newsrooms, where absence of bias is considered to be the industry standard, a subject of constant discussion.

Some of the news-adjacent startups attempting to address bias do so by producing media of their own, though they are reluctant to call the work they do journalism. Ballmer’s USAFacts claims to be devoid of any point of view at all. Like AllSides’, its stated goal is as simple as it is bold: “improving debates—and, by extension, American democracy—with government facts that every American deserves to have.” Richard Coffin, the chief of research and advocacy at USAFacts, told me, “We do take data and write about it. We do publish articles and have a newsletter.” But: “We don’t qualify ourselves as journalists.”

USAFacts has a few house rules: They use as few adjectives as possible. (Ballmer has said “adjectives are partisan.”) They never interview anyone. (Coffin: “We interview the dataset, if you will.”) They never make estimates about the future and rarely cover government projections—for example, the Congressional Budget Office’s anticipated size of the deficit in ten years—since that could be construed as “politicized” data. Coverage of dramatic, divisive topics—National Guard troops patrolling American cities, for instance—is rendered in dulcet tones: “What is the National Guard and what does it do?” “How many people serve in the National Guard?” There are no photos depicting clashes in the streets, no written descriptions of violence.

Because the site operates entirely off of Ballmer’s largesse—he spends thirty million dollars a year on USAFacts—it’s free to follow its mission, Coffin told me. “We don’t make money,” he said. “We don’t have any territory to defend.” Ballmer steers. “He’s in the office, he’s in meetings,” Coffin said. “It’s a passion project. He really believes that this is something the country needs.” Ballmer declined to speak with me, although he has appeared in ads for USAFacts, including spots that ran during the 2020 presidential debates. (“I love computers,” he says in one of the ads, “I love data, and I love facts.”) He also regularly goes on cable news to discuss what USAFacts does. “It’s almost religious,” a former USAFacts employee told me. “Data will fix everything.” During meetings, in which Ballmer engages staff about their findings, the former employee told me, he can seem to suggest that “his view is the only impartial view and every other view is infected by bias.” 

That does seem to be an occupational hazard of the non-bias business. USAFacts has hired people with journalism backgrounds, offering them perks unfamiliar to the news industry and more commonly seen in tech (free cereal, for one). But there has been dissonance between the path of reporting, of following stories where they lead, and that of chasing high-volume data. Several people with journalism experience on staff have wound up being let go, or they resigned; some of them were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements. “Trying to do facts without journalism is just inevitably going to fail,” the former employee said. As Pressman put it, “A lot of the time, bias is in the eye of the beholder. The only solution to that is: Don’t try to be objective. Have a commitment to fair and accurate reporting, but have a perspective and a point of view.” (“The leadership team always wants to make sure that anything and everything USAFacts puts out is as nonpartisan as possible,” a spokesperson told me “Our work is focused on data transparency and informed decision-making, not editorial journalism commentary.”) 

(Ballmer was confronted by a more classic form of journalism this fall, thanks to Pablo Torre—a longtime ESPN commentator and now a podcaster who is part of the Athletic network—who reported on a scheme in which Ballmer was allegedly circumventing the NBA’s salary cap. He is now under investigation by the league; the Wall Street Journal has called this “one of the biggest financial controversies in recent sports history.” Ballmer has denied the allegations; when reached, a representative for the Clippers pointed to the organization’s past comments.)

Sasha Anderson, an expert in civic technology—the practice of using digital tools to improve communications between the public and the government—helped launch USAFacts and stayed with the company until 2023. Now a faculty member at the University of Washington’s Information School, she describes companies such as USAFacts as having an “admirable aim” with a major central challenge. “Providing unbiased information is not that interesting to people,” she told me. “It doesn’t hold people’s attention. Our brains are primordially wired to seek stories and meaning. People are looking for the ‘so what.’” 

The companies aiming to cut through bias are still, ultimately, feeding into a media ecosystem fueled by bias, which, at its most dramatic, has a tendency to go viral. Donovan, of Boston University, argues that in order to break away from concerns about bias, perceived or otherwise, “we need to move past social media,” meaning that news organizations need to reach their audiences without relying on the giants: TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Donovan points to a few emerging models, such as small, local nonprofit newsrooms like New England’s Concord Bridge and Dorchester Reporter, and single-subject newsletter-based newsrooms such as 404 Media and The 19th—which, Donovan told me, almost replicate the feeling of getting a newspaper. “All these ways move us away from the monolithic corporations,” she said.

Anti-bias companies suggest that, by using their tools, confused news consumers can trust the stuff they see floating around the internet. But bias isn’t the only measure of credibility—perhaps a better one is the strength of an article’s facts. Consider the reputational upheaval of AllSides’ client Newsweek, a powerful brand that was run by IBT Media from 2013 to 2018, during which time its offices were raided as part of a criminal investigation into Etienne Uzac, one of the owners, in a fraud and money-laundering scheme involving Olivet University, an American college connected to The Community, a church that has been accused of being a cult. (Uzac later pleaded guilty to the Manhattan district attorney.) When IBT Media took over Newsweek, its first cover story was about the supposed creator of Bitcoin—which was not fact-checked, and was criticized for lacking substantiation. Since then the magazine has transferred to new ownership, by a pair of now-former IBT employees who have sued each other—all of which Newsweek has reported on—and it has since become an AllSides client.

Recently, I sat in on a virtual roundtable about political violence hosted by AllSides and Newsweek. The event started with an intro from Jennifer Cunningham, Newsweek’s editor in chief, who thanked us for our “willingness to take part in something bold and necessary.” Gable said we would be grouped with people with opposing political opinions, “kind of like the world’s worst dating app.” The roundtable had more than six hundred volunteers, recruited from the ranks of Newsweek and AllSides readers and via outreach by partner organizations such as Braver Angels, which fights “toxic politics.” We were broken out into groups of four and five.  

The conversation in my breakout group moved past the assasination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing media star, and bounced from immigration to abortion to trans rights. It was fascinating and, at times, uncomfortably intimate. Dan, a self-identified liberal and semiretired college professor from the South, spoke about explaining to his friends that, per his interpretation of the Bible, Trump deserved deference because “we must respect all governing authorities.” Mark, a self-identified conservative and a high school teacher in a rural part of the East Coast, said that if he didn’t have children, “I might sit back with a big bucket of popcorn and be fascinated by all the things going on.” But he does have kids, he continued, and so “I worry about them quite a bit—I worry what kind of country they’ll have.” He didn’t say what it was, specifically, that he was worried about. But his candor was well received. 

At regular intervals, text appeared on our screens prompting us with questions and discussion topics. One read: “It can be tempting to disengage or oversimplify conflict to ‘us vs. them,’ but maybe the real work is to build a stronger ‘we.’” The group didn’t talk about media bias or our news consumption. At one point, someone at the roundtable wondered, semi-jokingly, “How do we get antifa and MAGA in the same room? To have this conversation?” The question sounded equal parts sincere, hopeful, and ridiculous.

After the session, I caught up with Gable. The roundtable was just the start of a longer process, he told me: the conversations had been recorded and anonymized and now, using AI tools, AllSides staff would sift through the hours of material to pull out actionable conclusions about how to bring people together. “We can do deep research on people’s feelings and thoughts,” he said. With enough technology and enough discipline, he seemed to be saying, we will find the answers we need. 

This piece is part of Journalism 2050, a project from the Columbia Journalism Review and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, with support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

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