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Editorial

Original editorials

Most of Extra Extra is a mirror. This is where we write — essays on how the news actually gets made, and on the stories some outlets quietly decide aren’t news at all.

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The Senator Who Wasn't There

Six weeks after a fall, Mitch McConnell's seat sits empty and his constituents are told almost nothing. Washington seems fine with that.

By R. Morales

Why we write these

Most of Extra Extra is a mirror: we gather how the left, center, and right cover the same events and lay them side by side so you can see the differences yourself. This section is different. It's where we write — original editorials about how the news actually gets made.

The through-line is coverage itself. Not just how a story is framed, but which outlets choose to run it and which quietly let it pass. A framing difference tells you how a newsroom wants you to feel about something it has already decided is news. A coverage gap — the story that's loud on one side and silent on the other — tells you what an outlet decided wasn't news at all. That second decision is quieter, rarely defended, and often the more revealing one.

Each piece here works the same way: take a story from the week, line up who covered it and who didn't across the spectrum, and reason through the most likely explanation — audience fit, an uncovered follow-up, resource limits, or genuine disagreement about what matters. The goal isn't to catch a favorite outlet in a sin or hand you ammunition against the other side. It's to build a more complete picture than any single outlet is willing to give you, and to show our work while doing it. This is our reporting and our judgment — not an aggregated feed.