Media Watchdog
When the press turns on one person
Most of the watchdog measures how outlets cover a subject. This measures something else: what happens to an individual when many newsrooms write about them at once. It counts the coverage against that person's own usual rate, so an ordinary week for a prime minister and an extraordinary one for a private individual are not treated the same.
What is measured
Nine things, each recorded as the number of articles it appeared in. None of them is scored or weighted, and there is no single number: a severity index would be a claim that these have been shown to measure what they say they measure, and none has yet been tested against a held-out corpus. What follows is a description of the coverage, not a verdict on it.
Renaming by accusation
Does the outlet, in its own voice, replace the person's name with an accusation or an identity label ('Professor Plagiarism', 'diversity poster boy')? A designation carrying a recorded finding does not count.
Identity as explanation
Does the outlet offer a protected characteristic as the reason a person was appointed or held to a lower standard? Reporting somebody else's discrimination claim does not count.
Armchair diagnosis
Does a writer assert or tease a clinical diagnosis of a named living person they have never examined?
Unsourced private life
Are claims about childhood, schooling, health, body, family or home life carried with no record, institution or family cited?
Attacks on the person
Does the outlet's own voice attach evaluative language to the person's appearance, dress, body, voice, manner or misfortune rather than to their conduct?
No reply offered
Is a contested claim about the person carried with no response and no reported approach? A refusal or an unanswered approach both count as an opportunity given.
Headline drops the source
Does the headline assert as fact what the body attributes to a source?
Imputed investigation
Does the headline propose or presuppose a criminal or regulatory process against the person when no such process is reported?
Third parties named
How many other identifiable living people are named whose only stated connection is their relationship to the subject?
Published episodes
None yet. Nothing reaches this page without a person reading the evidence first and deciding it holds. An episode is a signal that a lot of newsrooms wrote about somebody at once, which is not on its own a finding about how they wrote, so it is treated as a question rather than an answer until somebody has answered it.
How every number here is produced: the watchdog methodology.