• by Joe Mandese , October 10, 2025

In the aftermath of ABC's decision to pull "Jimmy Kimmel Live" off the air following pressure form the FCC and big, conservative stations groups (Sinclair and Nextstar), I was listening to a pundit being interviewed on the radio who said the American media is now overwhelmingly controlled by Conservatives. I'm not sure why that surprised me, but I immediately began Googling for some stats to back that claim up. Then I turned to AI. Actually, four of them -- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok -- and asked them each to help me assess the political bias of American media over time -- from 1776 to the present.

As part of my prompt, I asked each chatbot to factor not just coverage, but ownership, business models, as well as the U.S. regulatory environment influencing the political agenda of American media coverage.

Lastly, I prompted each of the chatbots to score the relative political bias of themselves, as well as each of the others, and that analysis can be found in today's "Media 3.0" post, "The 0.5% Solution."

As you can see in the graphic above, with the exception of xAI's Grok, the chatbot analysis does support the notion that American media is now controlled mostly by the Right, not the Left or Center political interests.

Happy to share the detailed analyses they outputted, and there were many caveats to them to be sure, but they each were able to plot the relative history of American media's political bias going back to our nation's founding.

ChatGPT's (below) utilized a heuristic scoring method and is probably easiest to visualize, but its conclusion is that American media generally has been politically centered except for a slight left-leaning skew between 1898 and 1949, and a pronounced right-leaning uptick beginning in 1949.

Google's Gemini's assessment organized it by major epochs starting with the "Partisan Press" our nation was founded under, through the "Penny Press Transition" and, ultimately, to the current epoch of "Hyper-Polarization."

Gemini's assessment plots a marked shift to the right beginning around the time Fox News Channel launched. By the way, there's a great piece by The Wrap's Brian Lowry last week making the case that Trump's weaponization of the Justice Department was paved by Roger Ailes and Fox News Channel, if you haven't already read it.

Claude's delineation follows a similar plot line.

Grok said it could not output a graphic illustration of its assessment, so I'm adding a screenshot of a text-based version here (hope you can read it. If not, just click on this link and it will open a PDF version for you).

Bottom line: perceptions of American media's political bias has ebbed and flowed over the history of our country, but the actual skew is largely in the mind of the beholder, even if they happen to be an AI.

And the truth is, even the terms Left, Right and Center are somewhat semantical until you break them down into explicit issues or agenda.