Political Lean

What is the Political Lean Indicator?

When detected, the Political Lean indicator accurately detects and highlights any political lean present in content.

The Political Lean is displayed for individual news articles. It is available at the domain level based on the entirety of the articles analyzed under that publisher.

The political lean model is based upon United States centric political topics and viewpoints of Right, Right Center, Center, Left Center or Left. Content may also be political in nature but shows no specific lean in its presentation of that political topic.

Note that the Political Lean Indicator is not an indicator of quality

Using the Political Lean Score

The API response includes a boolean isPolitical field that indicates if the article is political in nature. In addition a politicalLeanScore field will indicate the presence of lean. The closer to 0, indicates a more right-leaning article, and closer to 100 indicates a more left-leaning article, with 50 being a completely center-leaning article.

The politicalLean field also groups the articles into five easy-to-understand categorizations:

  • left: 1-20
  • centerLeft: 20-40
  • center: 40-60
  • centerRight: 60-80
  • right: 80-100

If the article's isPolitical value is false, the politicalLean and politicalLeanScore values will be null.

If an article is political but has no lean detected the politicalLean and politicalLeanScore values will be null.

How is Political Lean determined?

Seekr reads and analyzes the entire text of a news article or piece of content, to identify if the article features political topics and what the author's stance is towards those topics. This allows an accurate and unbiased detection of political lean.

Seekr does not make assumptions about a website's consistent Political Lean, ensuring it doesn't generalize or introduce bias. Each piece of content is analyzed on an individual and URL level.

Some other conditions exist where we don't analyze the article for Political Lean:

  • The article is not about political topics
  • The article is too short to confidently predict a lean
  • Paywalled articles that require a subscription
  • Articles not written in the English language
  • We do not factor in Tweets/Posts, videos or photos into the analysis.
  • Articles where the text cannot be extracted

If you'd like more details, you can read about it in our FAQ.

How do I use it in the API?

Political Lean is returned in responses when detected.

API methods allow Political Lean parameters to be passed to filter content.