The world's news media, region by region

Five of the six are the United Nations' own continental regions — Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania — because that is a published standard anyone can check this site against, and because it is what most readers mean by a continent. The sixth is a deliberate departure: the Middle East and North Africa is carved out of Asia and Africa and given its own hub.

It earns one because it is a media system and not only a geography. A largely shared language, a pan-Arab satellite and wire ecosystem whose audience crosses every border in it, and a pattern of state and ruling-family ownership together make the left-centre-right axis behave differently there than anywhere else — and splitting those countries between "Asia" and "Africa" would have buried the most useful thing this directory can say about them. Membership follows the World Bank's Middle East & North Africa grouping, with Türkiye added and Malta and Djibouti removed.

Two consequences are worth stating plainly, because both are contested calls rather than facts: Türkiye is grouped with the Middle East rather than with Europe, and Sudan, Somalia, Mauritania and the Comoros are grouped with Africa despite Arab League membership. Cyprus is grouped with Europe. Every country appears in exactly one region, so the totals below add up to the whole directory and nothing is counted twice.

The widest gap is in the middle column: Africa has 98.9% of its outlets classified near the centre, while in Europe the figure is 73.1%. That spread is not mainly a fact about newsrooms. Media-bias assessments are produced overwhelmingly for North American and European outlets, so elsewhere a title is far more likely to reach the directory without a confident left or right rating — and a centre label then means "no reliable rating found" rather than "centrist". The regions with the highest centre shares are the ones where you should trust the front page more than the label.

The last column measures something more practical: whether a three-way comparison is possible at all without crossing a border. Across the whole directory, 35 of the 186 countries carry outlets on all three sides at once, and 18 of them are in Europe. In 123 countries every tracked title is classified centre, which makes the useful comparison there a question of what each newsroom chose to lead with rather than of political line.

Public broadcasting is the other axis on which the regions genuinely diverge: Oceania carries the highest share, at 18.8% of its outlets. How a newsroom is funded changes what it puts on the front page at least as much as which way it leans, which is why the directory is also cut by kind of outlet.