News Credibility Assessment by LLMs and Humans: Implications for Political Bias

Pia Wenzel Neves, Charlott Jakob, Vera Schmitt


Abstract
In an era of rapid misinformation spread, LLMs have emerged as tools for assessing news credibility at scale. However, the assessments are influenced by social and cultural biases. Studies investigating political bias, compare model credibility ratings with expert credibility ratings. Comparing LLMs to the perceptions of political camps extends this approach to detecting similarities in their biases.We compare LLM-generated credibility and bias ratings of news outlets with expert assessments and stratified political opinions collected through surveys. We analyse three models (Llama 3.3 70B, Mixtral 8x7B, and GPT-OSS 120B) across 47 news outlets from two countries (U.S. and Germany).We found that models demonstrated consistently high alignment with expert ratings, while showing weaker and more variable alignment with public opinions. For US-American news outlets all models showed stronger alignment with center-left perceptions, while for German news outlets the alignment is more diverse.
Anthology ID:
2026.wassa-1.15
Volume:
The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2026)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Valentin Barriere, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger, Célia Nouri, Debora Nozza, Pranaydeep Singh
Venues:
WASSA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
172–207
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wassa-1.15/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pia Wenzel Neves, Charlott Jakob, and Vera Schmitt. 2026. News Credibility Assessment by LLMs and Humans: Implications for Political Bias. In The Proceedings for the 15th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment Social Media Analysis (WASSA 2026), pages 172–207, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
News Credibility Assessment by LLMs and Humans: Implications for Political Bias (Neves et al., WASSA 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.wassa-1.15.pdf