koala73 / koala73/worldmonitor

feat(news): licence third-party bias ratings from AllSides or Media Bias/Fact Check

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feature P2 positioning
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Description

## What Ground News actually does
Kal described, without naming it, an app showing every country's and language's
framing of a story with a closeness-to-truth ranking. That is **Ground News** —
and usefully for a Toronto customer, it is a **Canadian company based in
Kitchener, Ontario**, founded 2018 by an ex-NASA engineer.

The key finding: **Ground News does not rate sources itself.** It aggregates
**three third-party raters — AllSides, Ad Fontes Media, and Media Bias/Fact
Check.** Bias weighs "wording, story choices and political affiliation";
factuality weighs "the credibility of sources used, the speed at which
corrections are made, and whether the language retains context."

Its real moat is **2,276 outlets hand-coded for ownership and funding** — that
is proprietary and expensive. The bias ratings are licensed and therefore
replicable.

Scale: ~60,000 articles/day from 50,000+ sources. Pricing: Vantage at $8.33/mo
billed annually, with a free tier. **No API or data-licensing offering is
advertised.**

## Recommendation
**License a named third party rather than inventing a scale.** Inventing one
invites an argument we cannot win and contradicts our transparent-sourcing
position; citing AllSides or MBFC is consistent with it — we would be showing
our work, exactly as we do with source provenance.

This is also days of work, not months: license or reproduce a source-rating
table and join it to article-source metadata we already carry. The presentation
layer (per-source colour chip, left/centre/right coverage split, blindspot
framing) is a UI problem, not a data problem.

## Acceptance
- [ ] Licensing terms established with at least one rater
- [ ] Ratings joined to source metadata
- [ ] Displayed with clear attribution to the rater
- [ ] Feeds the credibility score (separate issue)

Related: #1994 (user-defined Telegram channel watchlist) is adjacent — both
touch how per-source trust is assigned and surfaced.

Effort: L (~7d) including licensing negotiation.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

No files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by establishing licensing terms with AllSides, Ad Fontes Media, or Media Bias/Fact Check, then inspect the existing article-source metadata and credibility-score flow. Done means ratings are joined to source metadata, shown with clear attribution, and passed into the separate credibility score.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript
Domain
data, frontend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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