Ground News, which evaluates the bias and factuality of news sources and encourages users to identify “blindspots” in their media consumption, is a timely complement to any curriculum that covers media or information literacy
According to a 2020 Pew Research Center report, one-fifth of Democrats and Republicans get their news from sources in a media echo chamber (Jurkowitz & Mitchell, 2020). Ground News, a bias and factuality checker of news stories ranging from international to local importance, aims to change that. For a given story, it aggregates a number of news sources, providing an overview as well as information about the biases and factuality of each individual source in an easy-to-read format. Although it does not provide full-text access to articles, it does maintain links to articles associated with a specific news story. While structured similarly to a traditional news site, Ground News has made great strides in being compatible with the licensing and technical needs of higher education, including user authentication and accessibility. This resource could be a great complement to any curriculum that covers broad media literacy or general information literacy.
Ground News is meant to help audiences navigate the great mass of news resources and publications available across the internet. It is marketed to educators as a tool to “demonstrate the importance of lateral reading in determining the credibility of a news source and draw real-world connections to course material” (About, 2024). The resource’s primary goal is neutrality in reporting the biases of news outlets. They do not include ads and tout four guiding principles: comprehension not consumption, subscriptions over ads, pragmatism over partisanship, and locally focused news over global (FAQ, 2024) (Mission, 2024).
Ground News does not provide the full texts of articles as some aggregators might. Its primary focus is comparing news sources and showing how news stories are reported across different outlets. This resource is particularly focused on how bias is displayed across different media outlets. Their analysis includes a “Bias Rating” that shows the amount of coverage each story is receiving across the bias spectrum, a “Factuality Score” for each outlet, and information about who owns the outlet that published a given article. According to the Ground News website, the resource “processes nearly 60,000 news articles from over 50,000 different news sources” every day and those “articles from different outlets covering the same event are merged into a single story,” which is meant to allow for a comprehensive review of any given news story (About, 2024).
More about each of the scales of analysis for news stories:
In addition to these descriptors and ratings, Ground News provides a feature it calls Blindspot, which highlights stories that are disproportionately reported by sources on one side of the political spectrum. This status is determined by a specific set of criteria. For example, a Blindspot on the Left must exhibit the following characteristics (Methodology, 2024):
Ground News can be accessed via a web browser or a mobile app. It also offers a browser extension that can review articles on other websites as users access them in real time, a Reddit tool, a citation tool, and social media integration for reviewing news articles as they are shared.
Ground News can be accessed in a few different ways. I will focus first on the features available for free, both with and without creating an account.
The homepage of Ground News is a busy plethora of rows and boxes of information. At the top of the page, users can access tailored information (such as “for you” and Blindspot feeds) as well as a general search bar, followed by some clickable top news topics. The page’s main content consists of links to news stories. For each story, a thin bar divided between blue, red, and white—representing left-, right-, and center-leaning coverage—indicates the bias of the underlying articles reporting on the news story. Previews also include Blindspot highlights and links to 2024 election coverage.
For testing purposes, I select the topic “Artificial Intelligence.” This brings me to a page titled “News from Artificial Intelligence.”
On this topic-specific page, I can see Ground News’s aggregated stories with bias ratings for the underlying articles, a list of publications providing the most coverage of the topic, a Media Bias Breakdown for the topic as a whole, and, further down the page, Blindspots related to the topic.
I click to view a specific story titled “Elon Musk Comes Out in Support of California AI Legislation.”
On this page I can see, directly under the title, the bias rating categories (left, center, and right). If I click on any of those blocks, text appears under the title summarizing how publications in those categories have reported the story. A “Bias Comparison” selection briefly compares all three categories. In Figure 3, the “center” bias information is shown in the bulleted list below the title.
On the right-hand side of the screen a box summarizes “Coverage Details” of the news sources covering the story; below that is the “Bias Distribution” box, listing the sources and showing where they fall across the rating categories. This page also includes an AI search tool.
Figure 4 shows where the page begins displaying all the underlying articles, with links. These can be filtered by the “Bias Rating” categories. A block on the right-hand side displays the “Factuality” data, though it is not available in the free view.
In Figure 5, you can see where the site displays information about news outlet ownership (though this information is also unavailable in the free version) and similar news topics, as well as several further examples of the individual news reports that went into creating the story and its ratings.
Overall, while the initial view is a bit busy, I found that once I was clicking around on the site and into specific news stories, the pathways became more intuitive and were displayed in an easily identifiable way in clearly delineated sections.
The version of Ground News I used to complete much of this review is the free subscription option that anyone can sign up for. Additional plans include a Pro, Premium, and Vantage subscription, each with additional features. All institutional subscriptions include all features provided by Vantage, the highest subscription tier.
I tested the browser extension with all the functionality provided by the highest subscription tier.
Figure 6 shows a CNN news article open with the Ground News browser extension enabled. Across the top of the screen, you can see a ribbon that shows a bias rating for the sources covering the topic, which it also lists. A user can choose to hide this ribbon, log in to save the article to a personal account, or click for full coverage on the Ground News site.
The browser extension can also be opened, as displayed in Figure 7, allowing the user to view the bias distribution for outlets covering the story, the citation, and factuality data.
If the user has set up a personal account, they can also save the news story or a citation using the extension. See Figure 8.
These additional features allow for seamless use of the resource across news publisher platforms.
In my testing, the extension seemed to work best in Google Chrome over Firefox.
Figure 9 below shows all the additional features available with the different subscription packages. Please note that the prices included are only for individual subscriptions.
Ground News offers a license agreement for libraries and educational institutions and has successfully negotiated with libraries to offer its resources to institutional users via unlimited simultaneous access. Additionally, Ground News has a VPAT available upon request.
The vendor’s usage statistics do not currently comply with the COUNTER Code of Practice.
Ground News has partnered with LibraryUp, an organization that works to connect resource providers with libraries and institutions. LibraryUp is led by Rachael Perry, who provides an intermediary service advocating both for institutions and Ground News to reach amicable and library-friendly agreements. Pricing for this resource is based on full-time student enrollment at participating institutions or on total user population as applicable. The vendor offers additional discounts for multiyear agreements and for member libraries of partner consortia.
For more specific contracting and pricing provisions for institutions, contact LibraryUp or Ground News directly.
Figure 10 shows what features are included in institutional versus free access.
Ground News supports a range of authentication models. These include IP and EZProxy access; SAML (SSO) options such as Shibboleth, Open Athens, and Google Single Sign-On; and individual account-based access.
Ground News is a comparison tool for news stories. It is neither an aggregator of articles nor a media company that produces its own news content. Therefore, it cannot be compared to other news publications. However, there are some similar products that compare and develop bias or factuality analyses similarly to Ground News. These include platforms such as Google News, which collects and displays news stories; NewsGuard, which tracks and analyzes false information in news stories (among other applications); and Media Bias/Fact Check, which similarly focuses on reviewing bias in news stories. However, none of these alternatives seems to provide in one place the same tools to examine bias, factuality, and other measurements; the browser plugins and social media integrations; and the easily navigable interface that Ground News offers.
Ground News provides a refreshing way to engage with news stories in the interest of information literacy and critical evaluation. Its platform provides different ways to evaluate news stories while maintaining a familiar “news platform” type of display. Relatively few clicks are necessary, providing a compact experience for users. By consolidating the tools often seen in other products and services, Ground News provides a unique way to explore bias in media.
That said, its succinct nature could potentially be a drawback for some—it may not provide the raw data that an institution may prefer to support traditional research in media studies. It may work best as a supplement to coursework and other resources that have a traditional research purpose.
While not a traditional library content database, Ground News meets technical specifications, both necessary and preferred, for academic libraries. It provides accessibility documentation in the form of a VPAT, multiple anonymized authentication options, familiar licensing practices for institutional access, and unlimited simultaneous access for institutional users. Usage statistics are not COUNTER-compliant, but the vendor can provide non-COUNTER usage reports upon request.
After thorough review, I feel confident recommending this resource as a timely complement to any curriculum that focuses on media literacy or general information literacy. The target audience is quite broad, though the teaching and learning applications in higher education could yield a particularly high return on investment. Communities served by public and school libraries could greatly benefit from such a resource if libraries provided sufficient training in its use.
About. (2024). Ground News. https://ground.news/about
FAQ. (2024). Ground News. https://ground.news/frequently-asked-questions
Jurkowitz, M. & Mitchell, A. (2020). About one-fifth of Democrats and Republicans get political news in a kind of media bubble. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2020/03/04/about-one-fifth-of-democrats-and-republicans-get-political-news-in-a-kind-of-media-bubble/
Methodology. (2024). Ground News. https://ground.news/rating-system
Mission. (2024). Ground News. https://ground.news/mission
10.1146/katina-110824-4
