Our Methodology
How The Daily Martian collects, analyzes, and presents the news — and why every editorial decision we make is designed to keep us out of the story.
Where We Get Our News
The Daily Martian monitors over 40 news sources across six continents, updated continuously throughout the day. Our source list spans corporate media, public broadcasters, independent outlets, and state-affiliated press — deliberately. We don't curate sources to get comfortable results. We include outlets with strong editorial leanings in every direction because our job is to analyze how the news is framed, not to decide which outlets deserve to be heard.
Every source is classified by ownership type — corporate, public, independent, or state-affiliated — so you always know who's behind what you're reading.
How Stories Are Built
When multiple outlets cover the same event, The Daily Martian groups their articles into a single story. This clustering happens automatically using a combination of semantic analysis and entity recognition — the system identifies when different headlines, from different outlets, in different languages, are talking about the same thing.
How We Summarize
Every story gets a neutral summary written by AI — not copied from any single source. The summary is generated from the collective reporting across all articles in the story, stripped of editorial framing, loaded language, and narrative spin.
No territorial or geopolitical bias. No actor labeling. No editorial amplification. These rules apply uniformly — no source gets the benefit of the doubt.
Claims vs. Facts
The Daily Martian classifies key developments as confirmed, claimed, or disputed. This classification flows through every layer of the platform — headlines, summaries, and timeline events all respect claim status.
How We Detect Media Manipulation
Every article is analyzed for persuasion tactics — the specific methods outlets use to shape how you interpret the news. This includes loaded language, appeals to authority, cherry-picked statistics, selective sourcing, false equivalence, bandwagon framing, and scare tactics across a taxonomy of over 25 documented techniques.
How Scores Work
Each article receives a manipulation score based on the density and severity of confirmed persuasion tactics relative to the article's total length. The scoring formula is consistent across every source.
Narrative Framing
Beyond individual technique detection, The Daily Martian identifies the narrative frame each outlet applies to a story — the angle, the emphasis, the implicit argument. Shown side by side, these reveal how the same set of facts becomes a different story depending on who's telling it.
How We Track Developing Stories
Every story has a timeline — a chronological record of key developments as they happen. Events are extracted from incoming articles and deduplicated. Each event preserves the language of the original reporting, including qualifiers and hedging.
Where Outlets Agree and Disagree
For every story, The Daily Martian identifies consensus points — facts that all or most outlets agree on — and contention points — claims where outlets diverge. Consensus tells you what actually happened. Contention tells you where the spin begins.
Who Owns What
Every source is tagged with its ownership type: corporate, public, independent, or state-affiliated. We also show the balance of coverage per story.
Prediction Markets
Where relevant, The Daily Martian links stories to active prediction markets — real-money platforms where participants bet on outcomes. This provides a counterpoint to media narratives.
Our Commitments
We don't take editorial positions. We don't curate sources to get clean results. We don't score outlets as reliable or unreliable. We don't assume Western media is the baseline for objectivity.
Why This Matters
Every outlet frames the news. The Daily Martian exists to make those decisions visible. Not to replace the news, but to give you the tools to read it with open eyes.