It's the question everyone wants answered and nobody trusts anyone else to answer honestly: between Fox News and MSNBC, who is more credible?
Most people already have an answer, and it perfectly correlates with their political affiliation. That's the problem. The question of media credibility has become inseparable from political identity.
PressGrade was built to separate them.
You can also read our detailed comparison of Fox News vs MSNBC or our individual assessments of Fox News reliability and MSNBC reliability.
How We Scored Them
Both networks were assessed on the same five behavioral criteria, weighted by importance:
Factual Accuracy: Are their factual claims accurate? Do their headlines match their content?
Correction Culture: Do they correct errors openly and promptly?
Source Transparency: Do they cite primary sources? Is their funding and ownership transparent?
Content Integrity: Is opinion clearly labeled? Is content produced for journalism or for engagement?
Editorial Independence: Do they demonstrate genuine independence from their audience's expectations?
All assessments are based on documented behavior from the past 12 months only. No historical reputation. No political alignment scoring. Just recent, observable behavior.
What We Found
Both networks score in the Moderate Trust range, meaning they are generally reliable but have notable weaknesses in specific areas.
Neither network is catastrophically untrustworthy. Neither is a beacon of journalistic excellence. They both have strengths and they both have significant blind spots.
The specific scores and criterion breakdowns are available on PressGrade for both networks. We encourage you to look at the individual criteria rather than just the overall number. The breakdown tells a much more interesting story than the headline score.
What This Tells Us
The most important finding isn't the specific scores. It's that the networks are closer in credibility than their audiences believe.
Fox News viewers tend to believe MSNBC is pure propaganda. MSNBC viewers tend to believe Fox News is pure propaganda. The evidence suggests both networks operate with a mix of solid reporting and significant editorial weaknesses, and the weaknesses are different for each.
This is exactly why PressGrade scores behavior rather than ideology. If we scored political alignment, every result would just confirm what each viewer already believed. By scoring practices like accuracy, corrections, sourcing, labeling, and independence, we can identify where each network actually falls short, regardless of which direction their opinion content leans.
How Each Network Covers the Same Story
One of the most revealing ways to evaluate a media outlet's credibility is not to look at what they cover, but how they cover the same event as other outlets.
Take a major political story that both networks covered extensively over the past year. The basic facts of the story, what happened, who was involved, what the documented evidence showed, were publicly available from primary sources. Both networks had access to the same information.
What differed was framing, emphasis, and what was left out.
Fox's coverage consistently emphasized elements that cast the story in terms favorable to conservative political narratives and downplayed elements that complicated those narratives. MSNBC's coverage did the same thing in the opposite direction. Both networks, on the same story, with the same underlying facts, produced coverage that their audiences would experience as confirmation of what they already believed.
This is content integrity failure in its most common and consequential form. Neither network is making up facts in most cases. Both networks are selecting, framing, and emphasizing in ways that produce a systematically distorted picture of reality for their audiences.
The technical term for this is framing bias. It is harder to detect than outright factual error, harder to fact-check, and arguably more consequential because it operates below the threshold of claims that can be straightforwardly verified.
The Ratings Trap
Both Fox and MSNBC are caught in a structural trap that makes improvement difficult even when network leadership might want it.
Their audiences have been trained, over years of engagement-optimized content, to expect and reward a particular kind of coverage. Coverage that validates their worldview. Coverage that presents the other side as not just wrong but corrupt, stupid, or dangerous. Coverage that produces the emotional satisfaction of tribal belonging.
If either network were to significantly shift toward more balanced, nuanced, less emotionally charged coverage, a portion of their audience would leave. In a media environment where ratings translate directly to advertising revenue and corporate survival, that is not an abstract risk. It is an existential one.
This is the ratings trap: networks know that more credible coverage might cost them audience, so the incentive to improve is structurally undermined by the incentive to survive.
It is worth noting that this trap exists on a spectrum. Local news stations, public broadcasting, and wire services like AP and Reuters operate under different incentive structures, which is part of why they tend to score higher on credibility metrics. They are not immune to ratings pressure, but they face it less acutely than cable news networks whose entire business model depends on keeping a partisan audience engaged for hours every day.
What Scores Actually Mean
A PressGrade score of 43 for Fox News and 59 for MSNBC should not be read as a verdict on every journalist who works at either network, or on every segment either network produces.
Both networks employ journalists who operate with genuine integrity. Both produce segments that meet basic journalistic standards. The score reflects the overall documented pattern of behavior across the network's output over the past 12 months, not a claim that everything either network does is equally good or bad.
What the scores do reflect is a consistent, documented pattern. Fox's pattern includes a higher frequency of factual claims that have been independently rated as false or misleading, and a more thoroughgoing collapse of the distinction between news and opinion. MSNBC's pattern includes more reliable factual accuracy but a consistent pattern of editorial alignment that undermines genuine independence.
Neither score is a reason to never watch either network. It is a reason to watch with appropriate skepticism, to seek out primary sources when either network makes claims that seem surprising, and to supplement both with outlets that score higher on credibility.
Want to know how specific anchors at each network score? Search them on PressGrade. Individual scores are often more useful than network averages for deciding whose reporting to trust on a given story.
The Bigger Point
If you only consume media from one political perspective, you're not getting a complete picture of reality, regardless of which perspective it is.
The goal isn't to find the "unbiased" network (there isn't one). The goal is to understand the specific credibility strengths and weaknesses of the sources you rely on, so you can compensate for their blind spots with your own critical thinking.
That's what PressGrade is for. Search any journalist, host, or outlet and see exactly where they excel and where they fall short, based on evidence, not ideology.