The Business of Balance
At first glance, Ground News looks like any other news aggregator. The site displays a menu of trending news topics: Israel-Gaza, artificial intelligence, Donald Trump. In the feed below is a list of headlines. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 3, 2025, the headline at the top of that list is “Florida becomes first state to end all vaccine mandates for schools.” But there’s no news source attached to it. Instead, there is a blue, white, and red graph showing something Ground News calls “bias distribution,” and a handful of AI-generated bullet points.
To find the sources for this headline, readers must click on it and then scroll down to a feed that lists news stories from outlets classified as “left,” “right,” or “center.” The Florida headline lists sixty-nine source articles, 55 percent of which are outlets in the center, such as CNBC, 37 percent left-leaning outlets like the AP, and 5 percent right-leaning, like the New York Post. Readers then have the option to click through to read the full articles. The site also assigns each outlet a “factuality rating” for how accurate and trustworthy it is as a source, though that feature is paywalled.
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Related Knowledge Center: Information integrity
In an increasingly fractured media landscape, truth has been a casualty in the public discussion. Coverage has been warped by the business needs of struggling news organizations, and a significant segment of the public relies on bad-faith outlets that are little more than propagandists. While fact-checking has become routine, some organizations are exploring other ways to combat the trends. And misinformation spewed by AI-driven chatbots has become more of a feature than simply a bug.
Fact-checking and its detractors