About

In the same news cycle, someone in America wins a Nobel Prize for a new way of editing DNA and someone else in America marries a tree. Both are true. Both are reported by serious newspapers. They sit three stories apart on the same front page, and nobody comments on the distance between them.

This site does nothing but measure that distance. Every day it finds one story that shows what people in this country are capable of, and one that shows what they are also capable of, and puts them next to each other. There is no commentary. The content speaks for itself, and readers make up their own minds.

The pair is found and checked automatically, with rules that are stricter than most newsrooms': two independent accepted publishers per story, an adversarial second review, and verbatim quotes matched against the live pages. The methodology explains all of it, and the scan log shows every candidate that was considered and why it was or wasn't published. So far: 0 days, 0 stories.

America Is Not Real is independent and automated. It takes no money from any publisher or party, runs no comments, and sets no cookies. The code and every published day live in a public repository at GitHub. Headlines and summaries are licensed CC BY 4.0; the articles it links to belong to their publishers.

Made by Paul Bland.