How this works
Evenhanded is a free website that helps you compare how the same news story is covered. We write a short summary of what outlets agree on and where they split, show the headlines side by side, and attach fact-checks when the desks we use have published them. Nothing on the site is locked behind a payment or a subscription.
How stories get here
We collect official RSS feeds on a schedule and store them. This website only reads that store. We do not pull full articles onto our pages.
How we group stories
When several headlines are about the same event, we put them in one cluster. You see our summary of that event, then the original headlines grouped as left, center, and right. Each headline links out to the publisher. We do not reprint full articles.
National and World
Stories are listed as National or World. National is news about the United States. World is news about other countries, grouped by the country the events are about, not by where the publishing outlet is based. Those labels are not a bias score. If a country is not clear, we use World · International.
Our write-up
Each story page has two parts. “What more than one outlet reported” is the set of facts that show up across coverage, not a single outlet’s frame. “Where the coverage differs” describes what each side emphasized or left out. It does not pick a winner. It does not tell you who to believe.
Left, center, and right
We label the outlets in our feed as left, center, or right. Those labels describe the outlet, not every reporter who writes for it, and they are not a score for whether a story is true. We assign each label ourselves when we add an outlet to the feed. The labels live in our own list; we do not import a licensed bias scoreboard. A count such as “12 left, 8 center, 15 right” is a count of headlines in that cluster from outlets we have labeled that way. It is not a rating of the event itself.
Fact checks
We look at three desks: FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and AP Fact Check. When one of them has checked a claim, we show their rating in their own words and link to their work. If one desk has not covered that claim, we say so. If none of the three has covered it, we say the claim has not been checked. We do not invent a verdict. We do not average the three desks. We do not add other fact-check houses.
Coverage gaps
Sometimes one side publishes a lot of headlines about a story and another side publishes almost none. We call that a coverage gap. In our feed, we flag a gap when a cluster has at least six headlines, one side has at least five, and another side has zero or one. That is a rule about this feed, not a claim about the media as a whole. The Coverage gaps page lists those stories and says which side is thin in our set.
Who owns the outlets
When public information exists about who owns an outlet, we say so and we link to the source. If we do not have a source, we leave it out. We do not guess.
This site is free
Everyone can read every story, every coverage split, every coverage gap, and every fact-check. There is no subscription and nothing is locked behind a payment. We may show paid ads beside a story or at the bottom of the write-up. Ads never gate reading, and we do not take sponsors.
You can optionally get a free daily email of the clustered stories. The site itself stays free to read, and you do not have to join the list to browse, read stories, or use fact-checks. Donations are optional and separate.
If you want to help with the cost of running it, you can donate.
What we do not do
We do not reprint full articles. We do not use someone else’s licensed bias scoreboard. We do not add fact-check desks beyond FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and AP Fact Check. We do not take sponsors, and we do not mark stories as brought to you by a sponsor. This version is a website, not a phone app.