121 articles from 11 mainstream US outlets across the political spectrum, each scored on the 0–10 Manipulation Index. This is the reference corpus every Coverage Audit percentile is measured against — published so the yardstick itself is checkable.
Most everyday coverage sits in the framing band — word choice and selection lean, but sourced. Saturation-grade manipulation is rare in mainstream outlets; that's exactly why a percentile is more honest than a raw score.
Medians by outlet lean. Per-outlet scores are deliberately not published — this page is a baseline, not a ranking.
| Lean | Articles | Median MI | Most-flagged techniques |
|---|---|---|---|
| Left | 46 | 4.5 | Loaded Language (43), Transfer (32), Card Stacking (31) |
| Center | 31 | 2.6 | Appeal to Authority (29), Loaded Language (27), Card Stacking (17) |
| Right | 42 | 3.8 | Loaded Language (34), Transfer (32), Card Stacking (30) |
Most-flagged techniques across the whole corpus: Loaded Language (106×), Appeal to Authority (87×), Transfer (80×), Card Stacking (79×), Appeal to Fear (25×).
Built 2026-07-08 from the public RSS feeds of 11 US outlets — left: The Guardian, Mother Jones, The New Republic, Daily Beast; center: BBC, NPR, Axios; right: Fox News, New York Post, Washington Examiner, Daily Caller. Hard-paywalled outlets are excluded so every article's text could be fetched and every quote verified. 27 fetch-failed articles were skipped and disclosed, 2 syndicated links kept without lean attribution. Scored by the same engine as every Coverage Audit (claude-sonnet-5), one article = one score, no cherry-picking: the feeds' current output, as found.
Caveats, honestly: one build window (the news week of 2026-07-08); feed-selected articles skew toward each outlet's front-page mix that week; the Manipulation Index is a model judgment grounded in verified quotes, not a fact-check verdict. Read the methodology before quoting numbers.
StrataLens Reference Baseline v0 (n=121, built 2026-07-08) — stratalens.co/state-of-baseline.html