Manipulation techniques in today's news

11 articles, drawn evenly from outlets rated left, center, and right. Each one lists the manipulation techniques our model found — not a judgment of whether it's true.

⚠️ This day is not evenly balanced: left 5, center 2, right 4. We had fewer articles available from center and right-rated outlets than from the others — usually because their feeds had already rotated the day's stories out by the time we built this page.

← Previous day (2026-09-02)

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 2026-07-31), 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)
  • Center: BBC News (Center), Christian Science Monitor (Center), The Hill (Center), UPI (Center), Ars Technica (Center), BBC Business (Center), CSM Science (Center), Christian Science Monitor Commentary (Center), UPI Voices (Center)
  • Right: Fox News (Right), New York Post (Right), Washington Examiner (Lean Right), Reason (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), Reason — Volokh Conspiracy (Lean Right)

Limitations worth knowing

  • Semblen detects manipulation 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.

Get notified as this improves — new detection models, the browser extension, and outlet scorecards. Occasional email, no spam.