Civic Compass is a non-partisan tool for informed voting. We don't rank or endorse candidates, parties, or outlets — we summarize, attribute, and link back to primary sources. Here's exactly how that works.
Every outlet we track carries a bias score from −1.0 (left) to +1.0 (right). Scores are editorial judgments maintained by Civic Compass, informed by public media-bias ratings (in the style of AllSides and Ad Fontes Media) rather than pulled from a live third-party API — they're stored as data so they can be revised as outlets change without a code deploy.
There are no accounts, and nothing that identifies you is stored, profiled, or sold. Here is everything that leaves your browser, and where it goes.
Disagree with a rating, or think we're missing an outlet? These scores are editorial judgments, not an exact science — we welcome scrutiny.
Why the scrambled IP code exists: looking up an address costs us money (Google charges for each one), and some features have a daily limit, so the site needs a way to tell “this visitor has done this five times this minute” across all of its servers. It keeps a one-way code made from your IP address and the current time window. The code can't be turned back into your address, changes with every window so it can't follow you over time, and is deleted within two days.