How We Measure the Coverage Gap

When Meridline says a story drew thousands of articles worldwide but only a few dozen in US outlets, that isn't a vibe — it's a count. Here's exactly where the count comes from, so you never have to take our word for it.

The tool: GDELT

The GDELT Project monitors news media across the world in dozens of languages and updates continuously. Its open API lets anyone measure how much coverage a topic is getting — as a share of all monitored coverage — and break that volume down by the country each article was published in. That last part is the whole trick.

A worked example

Say a foreign government formally condemns a strike. We run two measurements over the same three days: total global coverage of the event, and coverage filtered to US-published outlets. If the world logs several thousand articles and US outlets log a few dozen, that's roughly a 90-to-1 gap. The Coverage Gap panel shows both bars and the multiplier — and links the query.

Why we say "disparity," not "suppression"

A gap has many possible causes: news priorities, resourcing, time zones, language, audience demand. We don't claim to know which. We claim the number is real and checkable, and that a pattern of gaps on a specific subject is worth watching. You bring the interpretation; we bring the receipts.

Anyone can re-run the query. That's the difference between a watchdog and a hunch.