How we rate news sources.
Every story cluster shows how its coverage breaks down across the political spectrum. Here's how those ratings are made, and what they mean.
We place each outlet on a seven-point scale, from far left to far right. Crucially, an outlet is judged relative to the mainstream political spectrum of its own country, not a single global yardstick. What counts as "center" in one country isn't the same as in another, and our ratings respect that.
On a cluster page, the coverage bar collapses those seven points into three buckets (Left, Center, and Right) and shows the share of covering sources in each. For clusters that span several countries, you can also see the split country by country.
Where the ratings come from
Independent monitors
Where available, we align an outlet's rating with established, independent media-monitoring organizations.
Automated analysis
For the long tail of outlets (especially outside the US), we analyze each outlet's recent coverage and framing to estimate its lean, with a confidence score attached.
Editorial review
Our team can set or correct any rating directly. Editorial decisions always take precedence over the other two methods.
When more than one method applies to an outlet, editorial review wins, then independent monitors, then automated analysis. Low-confidence automated ratings still appear in the coverage bar, but we hold them back from the blindspot calculation so a tentative guess can't trigger a false flag.
What a blindspot is
A blindspot is a well-covered story that one side of the spectrum is barely reporting. We only flag one when a story has enough rated coverage to be confident, and when one side's share of that coverage is very small while the other's isn't. A story everyone covers, or one that's mostly centrist, is never a blindspot.
Browse current blindspots on the Blindspot feed.
Limitations
Ratings describe an outlet's typical editorial lean, not any single article. A left-leaning outlet can publish a centrist report, and vice versa. Ratings are reviewed and updated over time, and we don't yet rate every outlet, so coverage from unrated sources is shown separately and left out of the split. If you think a rating is wrong, let us know.