Transparent, not neutral.

Critiqal does not promise objective truth — no one honestly can. It promises to show you the shape of the coverage: what outlets across the political spectrum agree on, where they diverge, who is behind each story, and the receipts for every conclusion.

How a story is built

For each news event, we ingest coverage from outlets spanning the political spectrum. Every factual claim in that coverage is extracted, then reconciled across outlets and classified:

• Agreed — reported consistently by outlets from different sides of the spectrum.
• Corroborated — reported by multiple outlets, but all from the same side.
• Contested— outlets conflict, or the actors in the story gave contradictory accounts (marked “conflicting accounts”). We surface disputes; we don’t adjudicate them.
• Single source — only one outlet reported it.

The synthesized report you read first is generated from — and linked to — those classified claims. Every paragraph carries its receipts: the claims behind it, the outlets behind those claims, and why each claim was classified the way it was. Nothing is asserted without a source you can click through to.

Where the bias ratings come from

Outlet bias placements are sourced from independent raters (AllSides, Media Bias/Fact Check) — never our own verdicts. Ownership and funding information is shown on each outlet’s provenance card where disclosed. If you think a rating is wrong, take it up with the raters — that’s the point of citing them.

State-aligned outlets

Some sources are government-controlled or government-aligned — RT (Russia), Global Times (China), Asharq Al-Awsat and Saudi Gazette (Saudi Arabia). We include them deliberately: they are often the most direct record of what a government itself is claiming, which matters when the actors in a story dispute the facts. But they are perspective, not corroboration. They are flagged with a ⚑ marker everywhere they appear, their alignment is named inline whenever the report conveys their account (“Russian state-controlled RT reported that…”), and they never count toward “agreed across the spectrum.”

Images

Story images are openly licensed file photos (Wikimedia Commons, Openverse — CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA, or public domain), credited beneath each image. They depict the people and places in a story, not the specific event itself.

Automation, honestly

The pipeline runs automatically: stories are selected by hard qualification rules (multiple outlets, both sides of the spectrum represented, coherent coverage) and every generated report passes validation checks before publishing, with human spot-checks after. If something slips through those checks, we want to know.

Contact

Feedback, corrections, and challenges are welcome: kafri.sg@gmail.com.