How I've Track Media Bias Over Twelve Years
I started paying attention to editorial slant around 2012 when I noticed certain stories getting different treatment depending on which network was covering them. That curiosity turned into a systematic habit. Every week I cross-reference how outlets frame the same event, and over the years I've built up a pretty thorough understanding of where CBS News lands on the political spectrum and how reliable their coverage actually is. CBS News sits somewhere in the center-left of the cable news landscape, but calling it "liberal" without qualification misses what actually happens in their newsroom. They run a traditional broadcast news operation with a corporate news division behind it, and that structure creates some predictable patterns. Their evening newscasts, anchored by people like Norah O'Donnell and Steve Hartman, tend to present stories in a way that feels more empathetic toward institutional reform and progressive policy priorities, while their Saturday Evening Edition and Sunday programs like Face the Nation operate with a slightly more conventional editorial posture. The difference between CBS News and a clearly partisan outlet like Fox News or MSNBC is real but smaller than most people think. CBS produces straight hard news that holds up under scrutiny. They've won Emmys and Peabodys for investigative reporting. But the framing choices, the story selection, and the language they use consistently tilt toward a cosmopolitan, establishment liberal perspective. Not radical. Not overtly ideological. Just the kind of perspective you'd expect from a network headquartered in Manhattan with producers and reporters who went to the same colleges and moved in the same circles.
I once spent three months tracking how CBS covered a state-level education reform bill that involved school choice provisions. The legislation had bipartisan support in the legislature and was popular in the district that elected the sponsor. CBS ran it as a controversial fight between progressive educators and conservative special interests. Local reporters who were actually there told me the community reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The network's editorial desk had made a judgment call that reframed the story to fit a narrative they were already working with. That's not a conspiracy. It's editorial bias at work, and it's the kind of thing that happens constantly across major networks.
How to Evaluate Bias Yourself
Most people consume news passively. They watch a segment, absorb the framing, and move on. That's fine if you don't care about media literacy. If you do, here's what actually works. First, pick one story and watch how three different outlets cover it. I recommend pairing a broadcast network like CBS with a cable outlet on each side of the spectrum. The differences will be visible within the first two minutes of each segment. Look at the headline, the order in which facts are presented, which voices get quoted, and what language is chosen to describe the same event. Second, track story selection over time. Bias isn't just in how a story is told. It's in which stories get told at all. I keep a simple spreadsheet where I log every major political story CBS covers in a given month and note whether the story's framing aligns with progressive, conservative, or neutral positions. After six months of this, the pattern becomes impossible to miss. Some months they'll lean noticeably left. Other months they're fairly balanced. The variance itself is data.
Get the Full Details
Third, watch their opinion programming separately from their news programming. CBS This Morning has opinion contributors who appear regularly. Those appearances carry weight with viewers who don't distinguish between hard news anchors and editorial commentators. I've seen people cite a CBS contributor's opinion piece as proof that CBS News takes a specific position, when in fact the contributor was appearing as a guest analyst and the news division never endorsed that view. The conflation is deliberate and it works.
Common Mistakes People Make
One error I see constantly is treating any story with a liberal framing as proof of outright partisan bias. That's not how it works. Most bias is subtle. It shows up in word choice, source selection, and story placement, not in explicit endorsements. A reporter describing a protest as "chaotic" instead of "passionate" isn't being biased in a way that's easy to prove. But the cumulative effect of thousands of those tiny choices across months and years is real. Another mistake is assuming that because a network occasionally runs a story favorable to a conservative position, it must be balanced overall. One good story doesn't cancel out a hundred subtly framed ones. I learned this the hard way when I called into a local CBS affiliate to point out what I thought was a mischaracterization in their overnight report. The assignment editor was polite but dismissed my concern, saying they'd covered the same issue three other times that week from a different angle. She wasn't wrong. The aggregate picture was what mattered, and the aggregate picture was skewed.
What Works When You Want to Stay Informed Without the Slant
I don't tell people to stop watching CBS News. It's a legitimate news source with skilled journalists. What I tell people is to watch it alongside other sources and to develop your own calibration. The best tool I've found is a practice called source triangulation. When CBS runs a story on a policy issue, find the original press release, the legislative text, or the primary source document. Then read how a outlet on the other side of the spectrum covered the same thing. The truth usually lives somewhere in the overlap between the two versions. If you want a purely quantitative measure of media bias, the Ad Fontes Media bias chart and the AllSides ratings are decent starting points. They put CBS News in the center-left range, which matches what I've observed through my own tracking. These tools aren't perfect. Ad Fontes has been criticized for methodological opacity, and AllSides scores can shift based on who's doing the evaluation. But they're useful reference points when you're trying to calibrate your own view. The honest limitation of any bias examination is that it can never be perfectly objective. The examiner brings their own assumptions to the table. I've had people tell me my analysis of CBS bias was itself biased because I focused too much on political coverage and not enough on human interest stories. They have a point. What I can say is that I've been transparent about my methodology, and I update my conclusions when new evidence comes in. That's the best anyone can do.
