Ground News Alternative: Receipts, Not Ratings
A factual, non-disparaging comparison of Ground News and Normalize the News (NTN) — what each tool does, and how their underlying approach to media transparency differs.
What Ground News Does
Ground News is a news-aggregation product. For a given story, it pulls together articles from a wide range of outlets and displays them side by side, sorted by where each outlet sits on a left-center-right spectrum. Each outlet in its database carries a bias rating and a factuality rating; these ratings are largely sourced from established third-party media-bias raters such as AllSides, Ad Fontes Media, and Media Bias/Fact Check, rather than generated from scratch by Ground News itself. Alongside bias ratings, Ground News also publishes ownership information for many of the outlets it tracks, so readers can see who owns a given publication. The product is available as a free tier, with a paid subscription tier (marketed as Vantage) that unlocks additional features such as deeper blind-spot and ownership analysis. Taken together, Ground News is best understood as a coverage-comparison and outlet-rating tool: it helps readers see how a story is being covered across the spectrum and how reliable third parties have rated the outlets doing the covering.
How Normalize the News Is Different
A bias score asks you to trust the rater; a receipt lets you check for yourself.
Normalize the News does not assign outlet-level bias or factuality scores. Instead, it publishes a small set of narrowly scoped, verifiable checks against individual articles and images, and shows its work at every step: what was captured, when it was captured, and a link back to the primary source so a reader can confirm the finding independently. The goal is not to replace bias ratings with a competing rating, but to give readers evidence they can inspect directly rather than a score they have to take on faith. That evidence set currently includes:
Revision Tracking
NTN captures the published text of tracked articles on a regular schedule. When a change is confirmed across at least two independent captures, it appears in the Revision Tracker with a full before/after diff and the capture timestamps for both versions, so readers can see exactly what changed and when.
Quote-Omission Diffs
Quote Check compares an outlet’s quoted material against the full primary transcript or statement it was drawn from, and flags portions of the original quote that were left out of the outlet’s own account.
Headline-vs-Body Checks
Headline Check checks whether the specific claim made in a headline is actually supported by the article’s own body text, and reports the result with a citation to the relevant passage.
Coverage-Presence Ledger
Coverage maintains a record of which outlets in NTN’s tracked universe did, and did not, publish anything about a given story — a factual presence/absence ledger rather than a ranked comparison.
Provenance Signals
Provenance checks published images for an embedded content credential (a C2PA-style provenance signal) and states plainly when no such credential is present, rather than inferring anything about how an image was produced.
Ground News vs. Normalize the News: A Comparison Table
| Feature | Ground News | Normalize the News |
|---|---|---|
| Core approach | Aggregates coverage of a story across many outlets and rates each outlet | Publishes specific, checkable receipts about individual articles and images |
| Outlet bias/factuality rating | Yes — ratings largely drawn from third-party raters (AllSides, Ad Fontes Media, Media Bias/Fact Check) | No outlet-level score published |
| Outlet ownership data | Published for many tracked outlets | Not a current feature |
| Article revision history | Not a core feature | Full before/after diff with capture timestamps (Revision Tracker) |
| Quote-omission check | Not a core feature | Compares quotes to the full primary transcript (Quote Check) |
| Headline-vs-body check | Not a core feature | Checks headline claims against body text (Headline Check) |
| Multi-outlet coverage view | Core feature — groups related coverage from many outlets in one view | Presence/absence ledger for tracked outlets (Coverage), not a full aggregator |
| Image provenance check | Not a core feature | Checks for content credentials on published images (Provenance) |
| Public corrections ledger | Not published as a standalone ledger of this kind | Append-only public record of NTN’s own corrections (Corrections) |
| Access model | Free tier, plus a paid subscription tier for additional features | Free to use; methodology published openly (Methodology) |
Which Approach Fits What You’re Trying to Do
These are not mutually exclusive tools, and this page isn’t arguing that one replaces the other. If what you want is a fast way to see how a single story is being covered across the political spectrum and where each outlet has been rated by established third parties, that is what Ground News is built for. If what you want is to check a specific, narrow claim — did this article change after it was published? did this outlet leave part of a quote out? does this headline actually match the story? — NTN publishes the underlying evidence so you can verify it yourself instead of relying on a rating. Many readers reasonably use both: a coverage-comparison tool to see the spread of a story, and a receipts-based tool to check specific claims within it.
Try the Receipts Yourself
Every NTN tool links back to its source material and its methodology, so you don’t have to take the finding on faith.
Common Questions
Is Normalize the News a bias checker like Ground News?
No. NTN does not assign bias or factuality ratings to outlets. It publishes narrow, verifiable checks — revision diffs, quote-omission comparisons, headline-vs-body checks, a coverage-presence ledger, and image provenance signals — tied to specific articles and images, each with a citation back to the source.
Is Normalize the News free to use?
Yes, the tools described on this page are free to use. NTN also publishes its methodology openly so readers can see exactly how each check is performed.