Sheridan, Jake. "Should You Trust Media Bias Charts?" Poynter. 2 Nov. 2021. https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/media-literacy/2021/should-you-trust-media-bias-charts/
Nelson Poynter, owner of several St. Petersburg, Florida, media outlets beginning in the 1970s, founded Modern Media, the basis for Poynter. Poynter educates and trains journalists in traditional reporting devoted to accuracy, ethics, and balance. Its website provides tools for teaching journalism, critical thinking, and media/information literacy.
The most useful article on Poynter's site is "Should You Trust Media Bias Charts?" It's a wonderful introduction to journalistic standards, current problems in journalism, and media bias. University of California Los Angeles communications professor Tim Groeling summarizes the article's premise: “When you [reporters] have bias that’s not acknowledged but is present, that’s really damaging to [viewers'] trust."
Groeling's quote also reflects what peer-reviewed research, trade sources, ratings, and viewer comments reveal about media: Americans increasingly understand that all reporting is politically biased and therefore want transparency--acknowledgment of and attempts to counter it. Ratings for organizations that claim political neutrality but whose bias is easily identified, such as MSNBC, CNN, and CBS News, among others, have dropped off drastically during the past decade, while ratings for transparent media companies, such as Fox News, have climbed.
Transparency is a good starting point, but to maintain a stable democracy, educators should model and consuming news from a variety of sources along with interrogating and reflecting on their own biases.