Former Iranian State Media Editor Now Works for US ‘Media Bias’ Group That Rates Liberal Outlets as More Reliable Than Their Conservative Counterparts

A former paid scribe for an Iranian state-affiliated newspaper now works for a U.S. media watchdog group known for producing a "media bias" chart that rates liberal outlets as more reliable than conservative ones.

Meisam Zamanabadi, an analyst with Ad Fontes Media, spent a large part of his career as an editor at Iranian state-run media outlet Hamshahri, a Tehran-run newspaper controlled at the time by then-mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf—now speaker of the Iranian parliament and chief regime negotiator.

Ad Fontes, which the influential Poynter Institute has praised as fair and "easy to understand," is cited by institutions like Cornell University as a good option for news consumers to evaluate media bias. Ad Fontes also promises that corporations that use its ratings can "get great business results by advertising on high quality news." Major corporations such as General Motors say they use Ad Fontes to "ensure that [our] ads also show up in reliable publications."

Zamanabadi, who grew up and went to college in Iran, is based in California. Ad Fontes's website describes him as the "founder & editor of the Tamashagar news agency," an Iranian sports news website, and says he has worked in "journalism since 1996."

Before moving to the United States from Iran, Zamanabadi served as the editor of Hamshahri's sports pages, according to a copy of his résumé posted online. Hamshahri, a state-controlled newspaper overseen by the municipality of Tehran, has been associated with hardline politicians and drew international condemnation after holding a Holocaust denial cartoon contest in 2006.

Posts from Zamanabadi's online blog indicate that he was an editor at Hamshahri in 2008 and 2009, while Ghalibaf was mayor of Tehran. His résumé also states that he worked for the Iranian Students' News Agency and the Iran Labor News Agency, both of which have links to the regime.

Zamanabadi has maintained ties to Iranian government media while living in the United States. He has appeared as a commentator on Iranian state TV multiple times since 2024, according to his Instagram. Last summer, he also successfully lobbied the Asian International Sports Press Association to pass a "resolution condemning the Israeli regime's military aggression on Iranian soil" during the 12-day war. Zamanabadi serves as vice president of the Asian International Sports Press Association, according to its website.

The revelation comes amid questions about Ad Fontes's reliability. The group publishes a "Media Bias Chart" that categorizes U.S. news outlets by political leanings and trustworthiness using two axes: one for ideological bias that runs from -42 on the left to +42 on the right and another for reliability that goes from 0 to 64.

Ad Fontes says it rates news sources "based on a rigorous, non-partisan content analysis methodology" and markets its analysis to schools and teachers as a supposed tool for teaching media literacy.  The group's website says a "pod of at least three human analysts" including "one person who self-identifies as being right-leaning, one as center, and one as left-leaning" rate news stories, podcast episodes, and television programs.

But last summer, the Federal Trade Commission requested records about Ad Fontes's business practices as part of an investigation into "possible collusion" between advocacy groups and advertisers, the New York Times reported.

A look into the group's analysis shows that it consistently rates left-wing sources as more reliable and often less biased than their conservative counterparts.

The Washington Free Beacon, for instance, has a reliability score of 24.09 and a bias score of 14.10.

The Daily Beast, according to Ad Fontes, is both more reliable and less biased than the Free Beacon, with a reliability score of 30.91 and a bias score of -10.80.

Ad Fontes considers Media Matters for America, a progressive activist group that describes itself as a media watchdog, more trustworthy than the Free Beacon as well. The website gives Media Matters a reliability score of 26.45. The Nation, though described as "hyper-partisan left," has a reliability rating of 30.39.

Socialist magazine Jacobin earns a 31.69 reliability rating from Ad Fontes, placing it higher on the scale than the Free Beacon, National Review, the New York Post, and the Daily Wire.

Ad Fontes also has left-wing outlets like Slate, MS NOW, Salon, and Jezebel as more reliable sources of information than the Free Beacon.

On television, Ad Fontes considers Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Jesse Watters to be more biased and less reliable than left-wing counterparts like Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Jen Psaki.

Ad Fontes founder and CEO Vanessa Otero told the Free Beacon in an email that her organization has "always found Meisam's analysis of news content about any subject to be thorough and well-reasoned."

"It would not be accurate to infer that because a news outlet from Iran is 'state-run,' that any given piece of information it reports is inaccurate, nor could you infer that a particular journalist is overtly biased toward the positions of Iranian government officials," Otero wrote. "Information must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Therefore we've always considered his experience as a journalist more pertinent to his ability to analyze news than his affiliation with particular outlets."

Zamanabadi did not respond to requests for comment.

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