Every week, some stories get covered wall to wall by one half of the media and ignored entirely by the other. At Signal/noise we call the ignored story a blindspot, and the useful thing about blindspots is that they do not respect a single political direction. The week of September 23, 2026 produced a clean pair: one story the right side of the spectrum skipped, and one the left side skipped. Neither omission was about framing. In both cases, the story simply did not appear.
Here is what each side missed, and a look at why.
What is a news blindspot?
A blindspot is a story that is covered by outlets on one side of the political spectrum and absent from the other. It is not the same as two outlets framing an event differently. It is the more basic problem of one audience never learning the event happened at all. We track it by looking at how many sources across the left-to-right range covered a given story, because source count tells you more than any single article can. When the count on one side drops to zero, you have a blindspot. If you want the full method, we wrote a step-by-step guide to finding your own blindspots.
Blindspots are a specific case of a broader pattern the media-analysis world calls bias by omission — the choice, deliberate or not, to leave a story out. This week gave us one from each direction.
The right's blindspot: a Category 5 hurricane
Hurricane Polo intensified into a Category 5 storm off Mexico's Pacific coast this week, and the US hurricane monitoring agency described the pace of that intensification as "truly remarkable." Four outlets covered it: the New York Times, the BBC, TIME, and the Associated Press. Their political lean, in Signal/noise's source map, runs from left to center. On the center-right and right, the source count was zero.
That is a right-side blindspot on a natural disaster, which makes it a cleaner case than most. There is no partisan angle to a Category 5 storm. Polo does not favor a party. Yet a reader following only right-of-center outlets this week would not have seen it.
The coverage that did exist was uneven in a telling way. The AP led with "one of the strongest storms ever" but did not name the category. The BBC was the only outlet to put "Category 5" in its headline — the threshold that triggers the strongest evacuation and preparedness language. TIME was the only one of the four to name a cause, connecting Polo's intensity to a super El Niño. The NYT opened with "An already busy Pacific hurricane season got a lot busier this week" and folded Polo into a season story rather than a storm story. So even inside the group that covered it, three of four headlines would not have told a reader Polo had crossed the Category 5 line. You can see the full breakdown on our story page for Hurricane Polo.
Why would the right skip a storm entirely? The likeliest answer is not ideological suppression but news-hole competition. This was a heavy political news week — the UN General Assembly, a Trump UNGA address, US-Iran talks in New York. Outlets that lead with politics filled their front pages with New York, not the eastern Pacific. Weather coverage tends to concentrate in wire services and legacy desks, which skew center and left in our map, and gets picked up more broadly only once there is a landfall track and a casualty count. Notably, none of the four outlets that did cover Polo reported evacuations, a landfall location, or casualties either — the whole story set was filed during the intensification window, before impact numbers existed. That is the moment a storm is easiest to overlook, because it is still a forecast rather than a consequence.
The left's blindspot: a Ukraine peace push
The mirror image happened on the other side. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presented security proposals at the UN General Assembly and signaled openness to an offramp from the nearly three-year war with Russia, after Trump publicly stated a peace deal is "close." Two outlets covered it: Fox News and the Washington Examiner. Both sit right of center. On the left, center-left, and center, the source count was zero.
By any conventional standard this is a major story. A sitting US president claiming a Ukraine peace deal is close, with Zelenskyy simultaneously presenting proposals at the UN, is the kind of development that has dominated left-of-center coverage since 2022. This week it produced nothing on the left. As with the hurricane, the gap is not about emphasis or spin. The story does not appear. Readers who follow the war through left-leaning sources went into the week without it. The full source map is on our story page.
The two outlets that did cover it were not identical. Fox News led with the diplomatic framing — Zelenskyy seeking an "offramp" after Trump revealed a deal is "close." The Washington Examiner filed a dispatch from Kyiv that opened with pedestrians checking drone alerts on their phones before air-defense fire sounded overhead, holding the war's human cost in frame at the moment coverage pivots toward deal-making. What neither outlet did was scrutinize the word doing the heaviest lifting in the story. "Close" passed through two news cycles without a follow-up question about territorial concessions, security guarantees, or Zelenskyy's red lines.
Why would the left skip it? A peace push credited to a president they cover critically is an awkward story to lead with, and skepticism about whether "close" means anything concrete is a reasonable editorial instinct. But skepticism is an argument for covering a claim and pressure-testing it, not for leaving it out. The more mundane explanation, again, is the news hole: the same crowded UNGA week that buried the hurricane on the right may have crowded out a hard-to-verify diplomatic claim on the left. Either way, the effect on readers is the same as the hurricane's — a real event that never reached them.
Blindspots do not have a party
The reason we track blindspots from both directions in the same report is that it is the honest way to do it. It is easy to notice the stories your side missed and treat the other side's omissions as proof of bias. This week is a reminder that the mechanism is symmetric. A center-left source cluster missed a Category 5 storm's headline classification and a right-of-center cluster missed a hurricane entirely; a right-of-center pair carried a Ukraine peace story that the entire left half of the spectrum skipped. Same structural gap, opposite directions, same week.
If you want to see this pattern build over time, our most recent weekly framing recap tracks the framing and blindspot differences across the biggest stories, and our June anatomy-of-a-blindspot deep dive walks through how one of these gaps forms from the inside.
The practical takeaway is the one we come back to every week. If you read one source, or several sources that all lean the same way, you are not getting a filtered version of the news — you are getting a version with holes in it, and you cannot see the holes from inside. The only reliable fix is to check the same event across the full range of the spectrum and watch for the places where the source count drops to zero. This week, it dropped to zero twice, in opposite directions.