We Have a New Contender for Ugliest Political Ad of All Time
An ad features Amy Acton's estranged mother accusing her of lying, in Ohio's governor race against Vivek Ramaswamy.
Rhetorical techniques in the news, October 21, 2026
14 articles, drawn evenly from outlets rated left, center, and right. Each one lists the rhetorical techniques our model found — not a judgment of whether it's true.
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⚠️ This day is not evenly balanced: left 5, center 4, right 5. We had fewer articles available from center-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.
Who’s behind the video of an Ohio candidate’s mother calling her a liar?
A video of Amy Acton's estranged mother calling her a liar surfaced two weeks before Ohio's election.
Enes Kanter Freedom And Royce White, Who Tried To Join WNBA, Are ‘Both Men,’ League Commissioner Tells Congress
WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert told House Republicans that Freedom and White are not eligible because they are men.
IDF Reportedly Ignores Hotline For Settler Violence
Haaretz reports the IDF hotline for settler violence in the West Bank is effectively unusable for civilians.
Update on Canada's Two Secession Movements
The writer updates his June post on Alberta and Quebec secession movements after recent votes.
Activists protest red state's law by sending 'bearded, burly' trans-identifying protesters into women's bathrooms
Activists in Kansas protested the SB 244 bathroom law by complying with it, including at a Dodge City water park.
Kohen Wiley’s Family Says Investigators Didn’t Contact Them Before Concluding Cops Did No Wrong
Mississippi's attorney general found the police use of force in the shooting of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley justified.
Trump's $8 Billion Diesel Bailout Pays Farmers for a Problem He Created
USDA announced $8 billion in one-time payments to farmers for the 2026 crop year, funded through the Commodity Credit Corporation.
Nikole Hannah-Jones Serves Up an Analysis Not Fit for New York Times Video
The writer argues Nikole Hannah-Jones contradicts herself by calling New York a school choice system while saying kids lack a choice.
ADL condemns Trump’s antisemitic slur but fails to mention him by name
The ADL posted that the term "Shylock" is antisemitic, without naming Trump, who used it at a Kansas rally Monday.
Trump snaps at White House reporter: ‘Are you a sick person?’
Trump told Independent reporter Andrew Feinberg to be "quiet" in the Oval Office on Tuesday as he began a question about golf courses.
'I say worse things than that every day': Jimmy Carr issues hilarious defense of Shane Gillis
Jimmy Carr defended Shane Gillis on stage when an audience member asked about the controversy over his SNL gym joke.
Even MAGA Trolls Apologize for Posting Twisted Attack Ad
Ramaswamy's campaign ran an ad featuring Amy Acton's estranged mother, drawing backlash and some apologies from pro-Trump posters.
Is the US abandoning Ukraine?
Newsletter explains Trump's recent shift on Ukraine: blaming Zelenskyy, delaying sanctions, and reopening the US market to Russian diesel.
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 Environment (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 Tech (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.