How We Review

Meridline exists to answer one question honestly: where does the money go, and who isn't telling you? That's a serious claim to make, so we hold ourselves to a method anyone can check. The rule is simple — receipts, not narratives.

Sourced figures only

Every dollar figure traces to an official record: USAspending.gov, ForeignAssistance.gov, congressional appropriations, the Congressional Research Service, DSCA arms-sale notifications, and SIPRI for arms transfers. We cite the source and the date next to the number. If a figure is an estimate or inflation-adjusted, we say so.

Reproducible queries

Our coverage measurements come from GDELT, which monitors global news in real time. When we say a story drew 4,000 articles worldwide and 40 in US outlets, that comparison is a query you can run yourself — and we link it. We report measured disparity, not asserted suppression. A coverage gap can have many causes; we show the number and let you weigh it.

Human-approved analysis

Meridline uses automated tools to gather and draft at speed — but nothing publishes without a human editor's approval. We aggregate through channels built for it (RSS feeds and licensed data APIs); we do not scrape and rewrite others' articles. The value we add is the throughline and the receipts, always linking back to the original reporting.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. When we do, we fix it in place, date the change, and note what changed — no quiet edits. If you've spotted an error, tell us and we'll check it against the source.

If a claim here can't be traced to a source you can open yourself, it doesn't belong on Meridline.