The 20 Most and Least Trusted News Outlets of 2026

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, scaled across thousands of outlets. Below: the 20 outlets Web Jury readers rate highest in 2026, and the outlets they rate lowest.

How this ranking was built

Most rankings either:

1. Survey a few thousand Americans (Pew, Gallup) — valid but limited to self-reported impressions, not claim accuracy.
2. Use a single editor's scorecard (Media Bias / Fact Check) — high precision, low coverage.
3. Use a small editorial team (AllSides) — 5 editors covering 600 outlets.

Web Jury aggregates reader reviews instead. Every outlet below has 1,000+ reviews; reviewers are weighted by their own review history quality (so drive-by single-extreme reviewers count less than consistent multi-source reviewers); and the trust score combines three signals — factual accuracy, bias moderation, and transparency. See the full methodology.

Data as of May 2026.

The 20 most trusted news outlets of 2026

1. Reuters — trust 88/100. Wire service with the highest correction transparency of any major outlet.
2. Associated Press — trust 87/100. Same wire-service DNA as Reuters. Accuracy almost indistinguishable.
3. BBC News — trust 82/100. International coverage scores higher than UK-domestic among Web Jury readers.
4. The Economist — trust 80/100. Opinion-heavy but consistently labeled. High accuracy on data-driven pieces.
5. ProPublica — trust 79/100. Investigative long-form only; small output but per-article accuracy is elite.
6. NPR — trust 77/100. US domestic. Slight left-of-center bias flagged consistently; high on accuracy.
7. Wall Street Journal (news desk) — trust 76/100. Sharp separation between news and opinion in the scoring.
8. Financial Times — trust 76/100. UK + global, high on financial coverage.
9. Bloomberg — trust 75/100. Financial focus, political coverage slightly below average.
10. The Guardian (reporting) — trust 73/100. Higher on investigative, lower when op-ed dilutes the aggregate.
11. The New York Times (news desk) — trust 72/100. Opinion section drops the aggregate score materially.
12. The Atlantic — trust 71/100. Long-form reporting; weaker on viral takes.
13. Axios — trust 70/100. Very fast, occasionally trades depth for speed.
14. Politico — trust 69/100. Strong DC beat, weaker on non-DC coverage.
15. Vox — trust 67/100. Explainer format, transparent on the opinion-vs-news split.
16. The Washington Post (news) — trust 66/100. News operation rated higher than the opinion section by readers.
17. CNN — trust 64/100. Commentary side drags the aggregate.
18. CBS News — trust 62/100. Solid but undifferentiated US-network coverage.
19. USA Today — trust 61/100. Wide-reach but lower depth scores.
20. ABC News — trust 60/100. Comparable to CBS and NBC in the network-news cluster.

For the full crowd-sourced ranking with live updates, see most-trusted news channels on Web Jury.

The least trusted (in US/UK English-language news)

Within the bottom quartile, the differences are within our methodology's error bars. Rather than ranking them 1-to-N, we group them into tiers of "not reliable."

Tier 3 — aggressively biased, occasionally inaccurate

Useful reporting on specific beats; treat everything else as opinion.

• Fox News (news desk) — trust 48/100
• MSNBC — trust 47/100
• HuffPost — trust 45/100
• Daily Mail — trust 43/100
• New York Post — trust 42/100

Tier 4 — primarily opinion, minimal original reporting

Present opinion as news. Rarely break original stories. Accuracy scores are low because they're not actually reporting.

• Breitbart News — trust 32/100
• The Daily Wire — trust 30/100
• Occupy Democrats — trust 28/100
• Zero Hedge — trust 25/100
• InfoWars — trust 15/100

Tier 5 — disinformation

Flagged by crowd plus multiple third-party fact-checkers for systematic false claims. We don't link to these. They're tagged in the misleading directory if you want the full list.

The surprising middle

The most interesting finding: outlets readers expected to score high often scored mid.

The pattern: outlets with clear opinion/news separation score higher than their reputation. Outlets where opinion content is indistinguishable from reporting score lower than their reputation.

How to use this ranking

• If you read 1 outlet: pick from the top 10.
• If you read 3: pick top 5 + one that's at least 15 bias-points away from the others.
• If you consume news through social media: assume the outlet is in the bottom quartile until you verify — algorithmic distribution favors outrage, which correlates with lower trust scores.
• Treat this as a prior, not a conclusion: a specific story from a Tier 2 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

1. Country-specific reliability for non-US/UK outlets. We're under-sampled outside Western English-language outlets. The Indian, Brazilian, and German rankings will be more reliable by Q4 2026.
2. Per-journalist reliability. Use our journalist rankings for that. Within any given outlet, individual reporters can score very differently than the outlet aggregate.
3. Reliability on specific topics. An outlet that's trust-80 on foreign policy can be trust-50 on health policy. We don't split this 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 the full comparison.

Want this ranking updated for your beat? Help review — every contribution shifts the data. Or rate a source you read.