About Bearings

Bearings follows a small number of big, contested, consequential stories over time. For each one, it gathers coverage from across the political spectrum, breaks that coverage into individual factual claims, and groups the same claim across outlets to measure how much genuinely independent corroboration exists — as opposed to a dozen outlets echoing a single wire report.

Every assessment states its confidence in plain language, tied to fixed rules rather than an author's hunch: a fact carried by many independent outlets across the spectrum is stated firmly; a claim from a single anonymous source is flagged as exactly that; where accounts genuinely conflict, both sides are shown rather than split down the middle.

And when a story turns on a primary source — a bill, a court filing, a budget estimate — Bearings reads it. Where the record settles a dispute the outlets are arguing about, Bearings says so and cites the section. Where the record doesn't settle it, that's said just as plainly.

Bias-rating services score the outlet — this one leans left, that one is 73% reliable — and then tally which outlets covered a story. That tells you about the messengers, not the message.

Bearings works at the level of the claim. It doesn't hand you an aggregate “truth score” and it doesn't tell you what to think. It shows you what's established, what's contested, who's reporting what, and — when a primary source exists — what that source actually says. You reach your own conclusion with the evidence laid out in front of you.

Read the full methodology →

Bearings is published by a retired U.S. intelligence officer. The analytic approach — distinguishing established fact from assumption, weighing sources, and expressing uncertainty in calibrated, probabilistic language instead of false precision — is drawn directly from the standards intelligence analysts work to (Intelligence Community Directive 203). The byline is intentional and the method is transparent; the name is withheld to keep the work independent and the focus on the evidence rather than the author.

Bearings carries no advertising and takes no outside investment that could shape its judgments. It exists to be useful to readers who want to know what's actually going on — not to sell their attention or confirm their priors.

Press inquiries, corrections, and tips: [email protected]. Corrections are taken seriously — if the evidence says we got a call wrong, we want to know.