Does The Factual have a left-leaning bias?

Hi there,

Here are the five most commonly asked questions by new readers of The Factual:

What do the credibility ratings mean?
How does The Factual select stories?
Who writes the summaries?
Does The Factual have a left-leaning bias?
Do you have an app?

1. What do the credibility ratings mean?

The Factual automatically grades individual news articles on a scale of 1-100% based on four dimensions:

Diversity and extent of sources (links, quotes)
Neutrality of writing tone
Expertise of author (past grades when writing on topic)
Site reputation (historical grades for the site).

Articles scoring 75%+ are highly likely to be credible.

You can see these grade details for every news article on our news site: thefactual.com/news. You can also paste any article's URL on our microsite: IsThisCredible.com to see grade details. (e.g. this NYT article).

2. How does The Factual select stories?

The Factual automatically selects trending topics based on the number of new articles on the topic in the last 24 hours.

Our editors take these automated suggestions and typically select 2 US topics, 1-2 World topics, and then either a business, science, culture, or sports topic that has not been covered in the prior week.

For each topic, the editors select 3 articles:

The highest scoring article within the last 48 hours as the lead
The highest scoring story from a news outlet with a different political leaning than the lead
A high-scoring 5 min+ in-depth piece from the last few months.

This gives you a well-rounded understanding of the topic.

Learn more on the story selection process in this brief two minute video.

3. Who writes the summaries?

Summaries on each topic are 3-5 sentences extracted from the lead article. These sentences are automatically selected by The Factual's algorithm based on information value and are double-checked by our editors for ambiguity. This minimizes our editorial input and reduces potential bias.