How Slantwise rates news outlets.

Slantwise rates outlets, not individual articles. A source rating reflects an outlet's editorial tendency over time. Readers use the rating to know what leaning they are reading from before they begin, not to judge any single story in advance.

Slantwise's editorial position is that the framing of news should be visible. Coverage is shaped by which stories an outlet chooses to run, where they are placed, and the language used to describe them. Naming that shape is part of the reading.

Slantwise groups coverage of the same event into one story, then reads that story as a timeline. When the story takes a new turn, that turn becomes a development, dated by when coverage of it actually began rather than when a cluster row was created.

Under each development, Slantwise shows one verbatim headline per side that covered it: left, lean-left, center, lean-right, and right. The headlines are selected and attributed, never written or summarized. When a side has no headline under a development, that side did not cover that turn of the story, and Slantwise leaves the space blank rather than filling it. The construction is mechanical and extractive throughout, so the shared spine stays a record of what was published, not an editorial retelling.

Slantwise groups coverage of one event into a story. When several stories turn out to be the same continuing thing, they are grouped again into an arc, and the arc is what the site follows over time.

Grouping is mechanical. Stories join an arc on the language and entities they share, not on an editor's judgment that they belong together. An arc needs several stories before it is named anywhere on the site, and it is named only when the name can be written from the coverage itself. Arcs that never reach that bar still exist and still hold their stories; they are listed by date rather than by name.

Each bar in a coverage record is one week, and its height is the number of distinct viewpoints that covered the arc that week among the outlets we track.

A viewpoint is not an article. When many outlets publish the same wire or syndicated copy, that copy counts once, placed at the leaning most of its carriers sit at, and at center when they split evenly. One outlet running five pieces in a week is one viewpoint, not five. The bar is then split into left, center and right, folding lean-left into left and lean-right into right.

Only outlets the graphs count place a viewpoint on a side. Section 12 explains which outlets those are.

A week with no bar means no outlet we track published a story that belongs to this arc that week.

It does not mean nothing happened, and it does not mean nobody reported it. An outlet outside our roster may have covered it, and a story may have been written that our grouping did not place in this arc. A gap is a fact about our holdings, stated plainly so it can be checked, and it is never filled in.

An arc is ongoing while at least one of its stories is dated within the last three weeks. After that the site says it has gone quiet, and names the day of its most recent story.

Going quiet is a label, not a removal. A quiet arc keeps its page, keeps its place in the subject's list, and becomes ongoing again the moment another story joins it.

Slantwise has crawled the outlets we track continuously from July 2026. Before that the record is reconstructed: the site is still working backwards through archives, and the first half of 2026 holds between 900 and 1,600 stories a month, against the 15,000 to 23,000 a month collected live. Earlier than 2026 the site holds only scattered individual stories, not coverage.

This matters when reading any record that crosses July 2026. A chart that rises sharply there is showing a change in what Slantwise holds, not a change in what the press published. An arc whose first stories sit outside what the archive has reached will open later on the site than it truly did, and the site names the earliest story we hold rather than the day the arc itself first drew coverage, because only the first of those is a fact.

Slantwise does not produce original bias ratings. Ratings draw on independent rater organizations whose methodologies are public. Most outlets currently carry a single published rating; where more than one rater covers an outlet, their scores are aggregated:

• AllSidesMethodology ↗

  Blind-survey methodology with editorial review across multi-partisan teams.

• Ad Fontes MediaMethodology ↗

  The Media Bias Chart: content analysis scoring outlets on bias and reliability axes.

• Media Bias / Fact CheckMethodology ↗

  Editorial assessment combining wording analysis, sourcing review, and factual-reporting history.

Where these raters distinguish between an outlet's news desk and opinion desk, Slantwise preserves the distinction on the source page. A reader can see, for example, that an outlet's news desk is rated centrist while its opinion desk is rated Lean Right, a distinction that a single-number summary would lose.

Raters do not always agree. Slantwise reports the disagreement rather than hiding it, and assigns a confidence tier based on how the panel converges:

When raters disagree by more than one unit, the consensus pulls toward the more centrist label. The default is conservative in the editorial sense: Slantwise would rather under-state a tilt than mis-state one.

Every rated outlet sits somewhere on this scale. The colors carry across the product (feed pills, spectrum bars, cluster tilt chips), so the scale stays visually consistent wherever orientation is reported.

Not every source maps cleanly onto a left–right spectrum. Wire services, fact checkers, foreign outlets, and aggregators carry an axis tag that flags their editorial function in addition to (or in place of) a political rating.

An outlet's rating comes from the raters, and Slantwise shows it exactly as they give it. Whether that rating puts the outlet's coverage on the left, center or right of a coverage graph is a separate question. The graphs are meant to show how partisan American news covered a story.

Most outlets count at their rating. Two kinds count differently:

• Local TV newsrooms count as center. Their local reporting is not partisan coverage, even when the station carries a left or right rating.
• International outlets, and outlets that mainly cover entertainment, sports or technology, are not counted as left, center or right at all. Their articles still appear on a story's page, listed apart from the three sides.

These are editorial decisions by Slantwise, and each one is recorded with its reason in the outlet's history. They never change an outlet's rating. Every outlet's source page states how it counts on the graphs and why.

Why the rule exists: 58% of the partisan viewpoints among the outlets we track come from left-rated outlets. Nearly all of that lean comes from foreign outlets, local TV and entertainment outlets, which carry left ratings with almost no counterpart on the right. Among the other American outlets we track, left and right are close to even. Without the rule, most stories read left for reasons that have nothing to do with how partisan outlets cover them.

Any reader may dispute a rating from an outlet's source page. Disputes enter a public audit trail and are reviewed against current rater evidence. A dispute can result in (a) no change, (b) a re-fetch of rater scores, or (c) an updated label, in which case the change is recorded in the outlet's orientation history.

The strongest disputes cite specific coverage, raters, or evidence, but every submission is read.

• A five-point political spectrum is a simplification. Real editorial positions are multi-dimensional; Slantwise reports one axis well rather than several poorly.
• A source rating is not an article rating. Some left-rated outlets publish centrist coverage; some centrist outlets publish polemics.
• Raters disagree. Slantwise shows disagreement rather than collapsing it into false certainty.
• Outlets drift. Ownership changes, editor changes, and desk changes affect orientation. Ratings are periodically re-reviewed.
• No rating system is fully objective. Every rating here shows the raters and dates behind it, so readers can check the evidence themselves.

Slantwise aggregates content from RSS and Atom feeds across hundreds of sources. Only headlines, summaries, thumbnails, and metadata are stored. Clicking any article takes the reader directly to the publisher.

Personalization is optional and off by default. Readers who turn it on get their chosen topics, followed sources, and relevance signals from their reading factored into feed order; readers who don't see the same neutral ranking as everyone else. Slantwise does not optimize for engagement: outrage content and clickbait are not promoted because they drive clicks.

Any legitimate news organization may request inclusion by writing to support@slantwise.news. Sources across the full spectrum are included, among them outlets whose editorial positions Slantwise's operators find objectionable, because completeness is part of the product. Sources may be removed for consistently publishing fabricated reporting or for operation by state intelligence services.