How Media Watch Works

What is compared

Media Watch reads the political and national articles that 59 conservative, 31 legacy, 25 left-leaning outlets published in the last 48 hours, as collected by the 4Search news index. Sports, entertainment and other sections are left out by the index's own topic classifier. The comparison is rebuilt every 30 minutes; the pages show the latest run.

How articles become stories

Every article in the index carries a numeric fingerprint of its text (a 768-number text embedding of the article body). Two articles whose fingerprints have a cosine similarity of 0.80 or more are treated as reports of the same story. The same test, at the same threshold, groups the stories on the 4Search front pages; at that level separate reports of one event match, while two different stories on the same subject usually do not.

A story is built around a lead article, the one with the most matches, and includes every article that matches the lead. Each outlet counts once per story however many articles it ran. Only stories carried by two or more outlets are compared. For each group, the headline shown is the one closest in meaning to the lead article.

The coverage gap

A story is in the coverage gap when at least 3 conservative outlets carried it and at most 1 legacy outlet did, or the reverse. A shared story is one with at least two outlets from both groups. Left-leaning outlets are counted and shown beside the others but do not decide either list.

How the outlets were grouped

Each outlet is placed in one group by its overall editorial lean as published by independent media-bias raters (AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check) and by the outlet's own description of itself. Where the raters differ, the outlet goes with the majority. Only national U.S. political and general-news outlets that published in the 4Search news index during the seven days before the list was drawn up (November 7-8, 2026) are listed; an outlet the index does not carry cannot be measured, so it is not listed. Wire services, public broadcasters, the national networks and the large national newspapers are grouped as legacy media whatever their rating. The grouping describes an outlet's lean, not the accuracy of any article.

The ratings consulted are published by AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check. The full lists are published on the outlets page, and the same lists set which outlets rank first in this site's news lists.

Limits

• Coverage means coverage in the news index. An article the index did not collect, or collected late, is not counted, and the index collects more from some sites than from others.
• A gap shows what was carried, not why. An outlet may cover a story later, on air, in a newsletter, or in a section the topic filter leaves out.
• Matching by meaning is automatic. A report and an opinion piece on one event can fall either side of the 0.80 line, and two different events that read alike can be joined. The headlines are shown so readers can judge each match.
• The window is 48 hours, and each outlet's newest 600 articles in it are read.
• Placing an outlet in a group describes its overall lean as rated by others. It says nothing about the accuracy of any article, and Media Watch makes no judgment about any outlet's reporting.

Corrections

If an outlet is in the wrong group, a story is grouped wrongly, or a listed outlet is missing, tell us through the contact page with the page address and what should change. We review every request and note changes to the lists on the outlets page.