Here's the honest answer to "what are the least biased news sources": there aren't any. There is no neutral newsroom, never has been. Every outlet is owned by someone, funded by someone, and staffed by humans with opinions. The real question — the one that actually protects you — is not "who is unbiased" but "whose bias is easiest to see." And that you can measure: who pays, who profits, and who can fire the editor. * You're right to be suspicious, by the way. Only 25% of Americans say they trust the news most of the time in 2026, per the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report — down five points in a year, and just 15% among right-leaning Americans. Globally, trust is at 37%, the lowest ever recorded. The fix isn't finding one magical clean outlet. It's knowing how each one is wired. * Tier one, the most transparent wiring: outlets owned by nobody in particular. AP is a nonprofit cooperative owned by the newsrooms that use it. Reuters sits under Thomson Reuters with legally binding Trust Principles. NPR is a nonprofit that survived losing its federal pipe. The Guardian is owned by a trust whose only job is to keep owning The Guardian. No shareholder needs a quarterly miracle, no oligarch needs a favor. They still have blind spots — newsroom cultures are a bias too — but nobody upstairs profits from slanting the story. * Tier two: public-charter and arm's-length state funding. BBC News runs on the UK licence fee under a Royal Charter; France 24 is funded by the French state through France Médias Monde. The state pays, but a charter and an editorial firewall sit between the treasury and the desk. It mostly works — and when it creaks, you can at least see where it creaks. * Tier three: billionaires and dynasties. The New York Times (Sulzberger family), The Washington Post (Jeff Bezos), Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The Sun (the Murdochs), Daily Mail (the Rothermere family), Bloomberg (Michael Bloomberg — the company literally carries his name). Some of these produce world-class journalism. But every one of them has a single human being, or a single family, who can pick up the phone. You don't have to guess whether that shapes coverage; you just have to remember it can. * Tier four, the least transparent: outlets owned by governments that also run armies. Russia Today (RT) is funded by the Russian state. CGTN answers to the Chinese Communist Party. Al Jazeera is funded by the Government of Qatar — editorially livelier than the first two, but the ownership question is the same. Read them if you like — sometimes you should, precisely to see what a government wants said — just never read them innocently. * Notice what this ranking doesn't use: left or right. A left-leaning paper that tells you who owns it is safer than a "neutral" one that won't. Euronews markets itself as Europe's impartial middle — it's owned by a Portuguese fund whose CEO is the son of a longtime Orbán adviser. Impartiality is a claim. Ownership is a fact. * So our advice, as a site that grades the press for a living: build a diet, not a devotion. One wire service, one charter broadcaster, one paper whose owner you could name in a pub quiz — and read each knowing who signs the checks. Every outlet on our Media Guide has its own ownership deep-dive if you want the receipts, outlet by outlet.