Blindspots
Stories one side of the press barely covered
A story most left-rated outlets ran and almost no right-rated outlet did — or the reverse — is the thing a reader of one side never finds out about. These are the ones we have counted.
Nothing to show yet. A gap appears here once we have counted the outlets on a story and found one side of the spectrum almost absent.
How this is counted
- What is a news blindspot?
- A story that outlets on one side of the political spectrum reported and outlets on the other side almost entirely did not. It is a gap in what a reader of only one side would ever hear about — which is different from a story being reported differently, and is usually more consequential.
- How do you decide a side did not cover a story?
- We count the outlets we can see running the story and group them by the bias ratings published by AllSides, Ad Fontes Media and Media Bias/Fact Check. When one side is near zero we mark the gap. We keep checking the story for up to five days, because a side that looks absent in the first hours often is not, and we only call the gap settled once that watch has closed.
- Does a blindspot mean a story was suppressed?
- No, and we do not say so. Newsrooms have finite reporters and different beats, and a gap is as often about resources or audience as about politics. What we publish is the count and the gap; why it is there is the reader’s judgement to make, and the outlets on both sides are listed so it can be made.
The full method, including how the ratings are used and who published them, is on our methodology page.
Before quoting a gap: half the stories one side ignores, it runs a day later — counted across every story we have compared, and the reason this board separates what is still missing from what merely was.