Patriot Watch

MSM Blackout

Most news tools tell you what is being covered. This one tells you what isn't. Every cycle, Patriot Watch checks the stories running across conservative outlets against dozens of mainstream front pages, and flags the ones the mainstream hasn't touched.

How the detector works

  1. We pull headlines from conservative and independent outlets and from dozens of mainstream and wire front-page feeds, continuously.
  2. A story has to clear a corroboration bar first: it must be running on multiple independent conservative outlets. One outlet's exclusive is not a blackout.
  3. We then look for a matching headline anywhere in the mainstream feeds we monitor. If there is coverage, the story is not a blackout, full stop.
  4. If nothing matches, it becomes a candidate, and a final editorial pass keeps only genuine hard news: an event, ruling, crime, vote, document, or dataset. Opinion columns, commentary, and reaction pieces are dropped, because the mainstream not running someone's op-ed is not a story.

What a blackout flag does and does not claim

A flag means one thing: at the time we checked, we could not find this story in the mainstream feeds we monitor. That is an observation about coverage, not a claim about motive. We do not say a story was banned, censored, or suppressed, and we do not pretend our sample is every outlet on earth.

Sometimes the mainstream picks a story up hours later, and it stops being a blackout. Sometimes they never do. Both outcomes are worth knowing, and both are visible if you're watching the gap instead of just the coverage.

Why the absence matters

Story selection is editorial power. What gets left out of the national conversation shapes it as surely as what gets amplified. You can argue about whether any particular omission is bias or bandwidth, and reasonable people do. But you cannot argue about it at all unless somebody is measuring it. That's the job this does.

Read it live

The MSM Blackout block runs on the Patriot Watch front page and updates through the day, with the covering outlets named and linked on each item so you can verify the story yourself.

See today's blackout list →

Related

How We Verify — the source counts and verification tiers behind every story. Corrections & Standards — how we handle errors. The Night Desk — signed editorials from the Night Watchman.

Patriot Watch — We watch. You know first. ← Back to the front page