The prediction market fancies itself a “global truth machine” and a boon to journalism. Tow finds a very different reality.

We love to hear when journalists engage with our research, so in October, we set up an LLM agent to sort through Google Alerts for Tow Center’s work and notify us when our research is cited in news. The bot began to diligently filter alerts for new mentions of the Tow Center and sent us […]

Building a quote-detection tool for accountability in journalism.

The Trump administration is publishing articles that are top-ranked on Google News.

President Trump’s attack on numbers includes public polls, an essential feature of the democratic free press.

Using large language models to conduct source audits of the news.

The $6 million–plus the progressive ‘newsroom’ spent on Meta lagged only the official Trump and Harris campaigns.

Late in the night after the last presidential debate, J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, appeared on CNN to praise the performance of Donald Trump. Kaitlan Collins, the network host, wanted to know why Trump had repeated a false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of residents in the town of Springfield, […]

In the month following Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race, Kamala Harris received a flurry of media attention.  But our analysis of closed-captioning data from the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive indicates that since the Democratic National Convention wrapped up in Chicago last month, Donald Trump has once again been mentioned on the big […]

Data shows that cable networks are focused on Trump and fascism—as they never have been before.

As the 2024 primary season ramps up into full swing, former president Donald Trump is making news both as the front-runner for the Republican Party’s nomination and due to the trials and indictments he is facing. According to closed-captioning data from the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive, Trump has been mentioned in 38 percent more […]

When a GOP megadonor didn't like the coverage he was getting from Wyoming's newsrooms, he funded a new one. Now it’s pushing anti-trans talking points and climate misinformation.

The Tow Center looked at how news organizations have been covering generative AI over the past six months.

At FiveThirtyEight, we strive to accumulate and analyze polling data in a way that is honest, informed, comprehensive and accurate. While we do occasionally commission polls, most of our understanding of American public opinion comes from aggregating…

When Lajuana Phillips was shot and killed by a police officer in late 2018, she was a mother of three children, a daughter and a cousin who was described by family as “a hard worker,” according to an online memorial. But Phillip’s death received…

Poll(s) of the Week Tuesday marked the international holiday for marijuana — and consumers of the plant had lots to celebrate this year. New York, Virginia and New Mexico all passed legislation in 2021 legalizing marijuana,1 bringing the total number…

In the weeks leading up to the 2020 general election, different pollsters told very different stories about who would win. Some managed to get pretty close to the actual result: a 4.5 percentage point win for Joe Biden. But some polls showed a…

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup. Poll(s) of the week America loves a good underdog story — and that’s exactly what it got in late January, when a plucky band of netizens on Reddit’s r/wallstreetbets message board decided to stick…

Suraj Patel’s 2020 campaign website featured three ads: one in English, one in Spanish and one in Gujarati. Only a tiny fraction of people in the New York City district where Patel was running speak Gujarati, but Patel told me that it was important…

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup. Poll(s) of the week President Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election has sown distrust in the election, especially among Republicans. According to a new Monmouth University poll,…