NOTE: This is an experimental feature and may not be included on all relevant articles.

We do not shy away from covering contentious or ‘dangerous’ content here at Texas Watcher. We believe in freedom of speech and expression, even if it isn’t the speech our Orwellian tech overlords deem as worthy of such freedoms. However, our main goal is to provide you our intelligent reader with the tools you need to separate fact from fiction and determine how much of an emotional and mental investment you should make in a story the internet suddenly determines you should care about.

One way we are doing this is with our “Verification Statuses” at the top of stories that make factual claims. Another way is with our Bias Alerts. Inevitably we will cover a story with a built-in bias. That bias might be in favor of law enforcement or in favor of an accused person, that story might be in favor of one political / social ideology or another. The story may by nature be one-sided, instantly slanting public opinion for whatever cause it might be.

Due to our Editorial Guidelines we already strive to eliminate all possible biases when publishing stories, avoding taking sides on a subjet matter and barring our writers / contributors from injecting their personal opinions into news articles which seems to be the unfortunate norm with other media. When this happens we will post an alert message at the top of a story in an attempt to let you know what biases are likely included in the story itself that we were unable to eliminate or negate in our coverage while being true to the story. Our hope is that these bias alerts give you one more tool in your mental arsenal to determine what and how you think about a specific subject.

We will have numerous bias alerts, it might not be possible to cover them all. Below is a list of examples you might run into in our articles.

1. One-sided Alert – This alert preceeds any other alert and is added when a story on a contentious issue is told only from the side of the one person or group telling the story. It will be especially included whenever such a story demands some sort of following social/political action or when the story is being used by zealots on social media to push such actions.

2. Activist Alert – This alert preceeds any other alert (except the One-sided alert) and is added whenever a story incldues any activist organization, collective, religious group, PAC, or employees at a company. It doesn’t matter if the story is about activism or not, in some cases activist groups uses seemingly benign topics to drive more followers to their cause first before activating more radical actions.

3. Political Party Alert – This alert preceeds any other alert (except One-sided and Activist alerts) and is added (along with the name of the party) when a story is specifically being created by, spread by, or favors one political party when it probably shouldn’t.

4. Corporate Activist Alert – This alert will be added when we discuss ANY company in a story where employees are currently or have recently been heavily involved in poltical or social activism of any kind. For example if H-E-B employees staged a walkout in favor of rights for aliens from outer space, articles relating to H-E-B published around the same time would alert readers to this and possibly link to factual articles on the topic.