[OC] Hedging and Passive Voice Trends across 8 News Outlets, 2016–2026 After my previous post on passive voice and hedging by news topic, I looked at the same idea at the outlet level. So I ran the same style of metadata-only linguistic analysis across 8 news outlets from 2016–2026. The two metrics shown are: **Hedging Rate**: Share of sentences containing uncertainty/speculative language, such as “may,” “might,” “could,” “reportedly,” or “allegedly.” **Passive Voice Ratio**: Share of sentences detected as passive voice, used here as a rough signal for less direct agency/attribution structure. The analysis is filtered to hard-news topics and excludes sports, entertainment, lifestyle, weather, and similar categories. Important caveats: * This is not a truthfulness ranking. * It measures linguistic style, not factual accuracy. * Topic mix and article type can affect the results.…