News outlets across the Americas

The Americas divide into media systems that share a hemisphere and almost nothing else. In the United States partisan alignment is explicit, commercially rewarded and — unusually — organised largely around television and digital rather than around newspapers, with only a small public-broadcasting sector anchoring the middle; Canada's market is smaller, more concentrated, and built around a large public broadcaster. In Latin America the decisive fact is ownership: a handful of family-controlled conglomerates hold national television, radio and print in the same hands, which makes a country's media map easy to draw and very hard to diversify, and which is why conflict between press and government there tends to be a fight over ownership and licensing rather than over individual stories. The Caribbean is a third case again — markets so small that one national paper and the state broadcaster can constitute most of the domestic press.

Of the 165 outlets tracked across the Americas, Crosswire places 27 on the left, 121 near the centre and 17 on the right. In 12 of the 35 countries here the press carries outlets on all three sides at once — the markets where a left-centre-right comparison can be made without leaving the country. In 17, every tracked title is classified centre.

Public-service broadcasters account for 8 of the Americas' 165 tracked outlets — 4.8% of them. Each one is a useful fixed point: put it beside a commercially funded title from the same country and the gap is often less about opinion than about what each considered news that morning.

Relative to its size, the Americas is this directory's television-news region: 21 of the 66 television news channels tracked worldwide are here — 31.8% of them, from 18.2% of the outlets. See that whole category worldwide.

This is an approximate orientation, not a definitive judgement — and not a rating of quality or accuracy. How leanings are classified. Figures are counted from the outlet directory itself and change as it does; last reviewed 2026-08-17.

In North America, compare across the leaning column; in Latin America, compare across ownership. A conglomerate flagship and a reader-funded digital outlet in the same country are frequently covering different countries altogether, and that gap is the story. In the Caribbean, where a country may have only two or three titles of its own, the more revealing comparison is with a neighbour: island states cover each other's politics closely, and the regional account of an event is often sharper than the domestic one.