Evaluating Credibility and Political Bias in LLMs for News Outlets in Bangladesh

Tabia Tanzin Prama, Md. Saiful Islam


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are widelyused in search engines to provide direct an-swers, while AI chatbots retrieve updated infor-mation from the web. As these systems influ-ence how billions access information, evaluat-ing the credibility of news outlets has becomecrucial. We audit nine LLMs from OpenAI,Google, and Meta to assess their ability to eval-uate the credibility and political bias of the top20 most popular news outlets in Bangladesh.While most LLMs rate the tested outlets, largermodels often refuse to rate sources due to in-sufficient information, while smaller modelsare more prone to hallucinations. We create adataset of credibility ratings and political iden-tities based on journalism experts’ opinions andcompare these with LLM responses. We findstrong internal consistency in LLM credibil-ity ratings, with an average correlation coeffi-cient (ρ) of 0.72, but moderate alignment withexpert evaluations, with an average ρ of 0.45.Most LLMs (GPT-4, GPT-4o-mini, Llama 3.3,Llama-3.1-70B, Llama 3.1 8B, and Gemini 1.5Pro) in their default configurations favor theleft-leaning Bangladesh Awami League, givinghigher credibility ratings, and show misalign-ment with human experts. These findings high-light the significant role of LLMs in shapingnews and political information
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-srw.42
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Jin Zhao, Mingyang Wang, Zhu Liu
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ACL | WS
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
665–677
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-srw.42/
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Cite (ACL):
Tabia Tanzin Prama and Md. Saiful Islam. 2025. Evaluating Credibility and Political Bias in LLMs for News Outlets in Bangladesh. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop), pages 665–677, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Credibility and Political Bias in LLMs for News Outlets in Bangladesh (Prama & Islam, ACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-srw.42.pdf