Barometer
How often the press uses the mechanisms in our glossary, measured on an automatic sample of articles rather than on the ones we choose to critique.
Experimental: these figures are a preview and may change as the method is refined.
Week of 12 – 18 October 2026, about
1 in 9
articles flagged for at least one mechanism (10.5%)
4196 articles sampled and judged
Mechanisms, ranked
Not detected this week: Bothsidesism, Buried lede, Commitment-free statement, Fossil legalism; some mechanisms may not be detectable from a single article.
The week, day by day
Each bar stacks one day's mechanism rates on one scale across the week, so lengths compare; the figure is the share of that day's articles flagged at least once. Single days swing a lot: read the week, not one day.
By country
Each bar stacks one country's mechanism rates on one scale, so lengths compare. A country here means the outlets in our panel, not its whole press.
How this is measured
- A fixed panel of 17 outlets in the UK, France and the USA. Every 2 hours, up to 7 articles per outlet are drawn at random from what its RSS feed published since the previous draw: a sample, not everything they publish.
- Each article is judged by an algorithm for each glossary mechanism. A mechanism counts when the algorithm's probability is 0.78 or more. Its precision is not always checked by a human; read the figures as indicative.
- Each article is judged on its headline and full text (for the rare very long piece, its first and last parts). Paywalled articles are left out.
- French articles are judged in French, so France is not strictly comparable with the UK and the USA.
- The sample started on 12 October 2026. Days are counted in Paris time. These rates come from the sample alone, independent of which articles we critique.
Data as of 18 October 2026.