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Clad grades news coverage for factual accuracy and political lean, with sources you can check. These short explainers cover how the grading works and — more usefully — how to read any political news like someone who checks receipts. When you're ready to practice, there's a new quiz every morning.
How Clad grades a broadcast
Every report starts with what was actually said on air. The load-bearing claims in a segment are checked against primary sources — the bill text, the transcript, the agency data, the original study — and each claim gets a tag: verified, disputed, missing context, or unsupported.
The letter grade (A+ to F) scores the broadcast's factual accuracy as a whole: how well its claims held up, whether corrections were made on air, and whether the framing matched the evidence. It is a grade for the coverage, not for the people or the politics being covered.
Every grade is reviewed and approved by the editor before it publishes, and any reader with an account can dispute one — the report is re-run through the same grading logic, and if it doesn't hold up, it comes down.
Worked examples
How to read a political-lean score
Lean is measured on a -100 to +100 axis: negative numbers lean left, positive numbers lean right, and anything within a few points of zero reads as "Centered." The score reflects cues in the coverage itself — whose voices got airtime, what language framed the story, which counter-evidence was left out.
Lean is not a verdict on accuracy. A broadcast can lean hard in one direction and still be factually careful, and a "Centered" segment can still get its facts wrong. That is why Clad scores them separately — read both numbers, not just one.
Worked examples
Why every report cites its sources
Every Clad report lists the sources behind its verdicts — typically four to seven, favoring primary documents over other outlets' coverage. The sources are numbered in the report so you can check any claim yourself.
That is the habit worth building: don't take Clad's word for it either. Click a source. If a claim matters to you, read what it actually rests on. A fact-checker that asks for blind trust has missed its own point.
Worked examples
How to spot spin in a broadcast
A few patterns cover most of it. Loaded language: "slammed," "gutted," "caved" tell you how to feel before you know what happened. Selective statistics: a real number with the base rate, time frame, or comparison stripped away. One-sided sourcing: every quoted expert agrees with the segment's framing. The missing "compared to what": costs without benefits, risks without baselines. And urgency: rushed certainty about stories that are still developing.
None of these mean a claim is false — they mean slow down and check. The daily quiz is practice for exactly this reflex.
Worked examples
A first-time voter's guide to reading political news
Three habits beat any single source of truth. First, read the claim, not the headline — headlines are written to travel, and they shed nuance on the way. Second, notice who is speaking: campaign surrogates, anonymous officials, and independent analysts are different kinds of evidence. Third, when a story moves you strongly, that is precisely when to check a second source — outrage is the easiest thing to manufacture.
Clad won't tell you what to think about a policy or a candidate — that is not its job. It grades whether the coverage you're watching told you the truth. What you do with the truth is yours.
Worked examples
Deeper detail lives in How it works. A free account unlocks every grade and lean rating — no card, no trial clock.