Rhetorical techniques in the news, August 16, 2026

How these articles were chosen

• Sources are a fixed, version-controlled list of outlets, not picked per day.
• Equal numbers are taken from left-, center-, and right-rated outlets, using the AllSides media bias ratings — those labels are theirs, not ours.
• Within an outlet we take the most recent articles from its politics or world section feed. No human picks the interesting ones.
• Live blogs, podcasts, video and photo galleries are skipped — they contain too little text to analyze.

The full source list

Ratings below are AllSides' own labels (retrieved 2026-09-09), not ours. We group Left and Lean Left together, and Lean Right and Right together, which balances direction but not intensity — the exact ratings are here so you can judge that yourself.

• Left: The Guardian (US) (Left), NPR (Lean Left), Vox (Left), Mother Jones (Left), The Guardian Tech (Left), Guardian Science (Left), NPR Business (Lean Left), NPR Technology (Lean Left), Guardian Opinion (Left), Mother Jones Environment (Left), HuffPost (Left), Slate (Left), The Intercept (Left), The Nation (Left), Salon (Left), The New Republic (Left), Common Dreams (Left), The Daily Beast (Left), The Atlantic (Left), Politico (Lean Left), ABC News (Lean Left), CBS News (Lean Left), NBC News (Lean Left), Al Jazeera (Lean Left), Axios (Lean Left), PBS NewsHour (Lean Left), Semafor (Lean Left)
• Center: BBC News (Center), Christian Science Monitor (Center), The Hill (Center), UPI (Center), Reason (Center), Ars Technica (Center), BBC Business (Center), CSM Science (Center), Reason — Volokh Conspiracy (Center), Christian Science Monitor Commentary (Center), UPI Voices (Center), Bloomberg (Center), Straight Arrow News (Center), NewsNation (Center), Deutsche Welle (Center)
• Right: Fox News (Right), New York Post (Right), Washington Examiner (Lean Right), New York Post Business (Right), Fox Science (Right), Washington Examiner Opinion (Lean Right), New York Post Tech (Right), Washington Examiner Business (Lean Right), New York Post Opinion (Right), Washington Times (Lean Right), National Review (Lean Right), The Federalist (Right), The Daily Wire (Right), The Daily Caller (Right), Washington Free Beacon (Right), Breitbart (Right), TheBlaze (Right), Just the News (Lean Right), RedState (Right)

Who owns each outlet, and every article we've analyzed from it: the outlets.

Limitations worth knowing

• Semblen detects rhetorical techniques, not left/right tilt.
• The model has known false positives on strong-but-legitimate language — particularly military reporting and opinion writing in the author's own voice.
• We list the techniques found. A technique flag is not a claim that an article is false, and we don't rank outlets against each other.
• Articles where the model found nothing are not published — there'd be nothing on the page.
• Each article is analyzed once, at the time shown on its page. Outlets sometimes update articles after publication, so a quoted phrase may no longer appear in the current version.
• Findings may include language an outlet is quoting rather than asserting — a politician's attack line, or an opponent's own words. We flag technique wherever it appears, including inside quotations.
• We link to each original article and quote only short phrases as evidence.