The Most and Least Trusted News Outlets of 2026
A live ranking of the news sites on internet standing, highest and lowest first, trust-weighted by each reviewer's track record. Compare your outlet's record.
Internet Standing12 May 2026 · 11 min read
Stills from recent uploads by BBC News, The Economist, CNN and ABC News on YouTube
Most "most trusted news" rankings come from a small panel of editors or a single researcher. This one comes from crowd-sourced, trust-weighted reader reviews, and it is live: the lists below are read from the record each time the page is built, so they move as verdicts come in.
How this ranking is built
Most rankings either:
- Survey a few thousand Americans (Pew, Gallup) — valid but limited to self-reported impressions, not claim accuracy.
- Use a single editor's scorecard (Media Bias / Fact Check) — high precision, low coverage.
- Use a small editorial team (AllSides) — a few editors covering hundreds of outlets.
Internet Standing aggregates reader reviews instead. Reviewers are weighted by their own track record (so drive-by single-extreme reviewers count less than consistent multi-source reviewers), and an outlet is ranked only once it has 20 ratings — below that it says "not scored yet" and stays off the list. See the full methodology.
No news site on the record has reached 20 ratings yet, so there is no ranking to show. 5 sites are gathering ratings now.
For the full crowd-sourced ranking across every platform, see most-trusted news channels on Internet Standing.
Reading the bottom of the list
Near the bottom, small differences in score matter less than the reasons behind them. Open any record to read the verdicts and see the full spread of votes before you treat its rank as a conclusion. Outlets flagged by the crowd and by third-party fact-checkers for systematic false claims are tagged in the misleading directory.
How to use this ranking
- If you read 1 outlet: pick from the top 10.
- If you read 3: pick two from the top of the list + one placed well away from them on the bias scale.
- If you consume news through social media: look the outlet up before you trust it — algorithmic distribution favors outrage.
- Treat this as a prior, not a conclusion: a specific story from a low-ranked outlet is not necessarily wrong, and a story from the top 10 is not necessarily right. These scores describe probability over many stories, not certainty about any one.
What this ranking can't tell you
- Country-specific reliability for non-US/UK outlets. Coverage is still thin outside English-language outlets, so rankings for other countries are not yet meaningful.
- Per-journalist reliability. Use our journalist rankings for that. Within any given outlet, individual reporters can score very differently than the outlet aggregate.
- Reliability on specific topics. An outlet that is strong on foreign policy can be weak on health policy. We don't split scores by topic yet.
Why we publish this differently
AllSides covers 600 outlets with 5 editors. NewsGuard charges a subscription. Media Bias / Fact Check is one researcher's opinion. We aggregate the crowd, weight by track record, show distributions instead of single scores. The result: a ranking that can scale to thousands of outlets without losing granularity. See how the number is built.
Want this ranking updated for your beat? Help review — every contribution shifts the data. Or rate a source you read.
