User:IntoThinAir/ITN thoughts

I have long been convinced that WP:ITN has a significant bias against the United States, such that it is much less willing to post stories about news events or individuals who have died when those events/individuals are American than if they are from some other country.

I noticed this soon after I began participating in the ITNC process in 2014, a full decade ago now. Many, many times I have seen significant events in the United States nominated at ITNC only to get voted down and thus never posted, and I often suspect that the idea that stories from the United States must be held to a ridiculously high standard is at least part of why this has happened so often. The conclusion that ITN is massively and unfairly biased against the United States is as inescapable as it is glaringly obvious. And I am far from the only person to notice this over the years: to give just one example, in December 2023, Precarious Worlds said, "We have a chronic allergy to anything to do with Domestic US Affairs. But next week we'll happily post the Ecuadorian Netball Tournament or whatever". Knightoftheswords281 has also been active pointing this out, having done so numerous times in June 2023 alone, e.g. when he pointed out, correctly, that "Systemic bias is combated on ITN by posting more stories from other parts of the world, not opposing more stories from the west".

I do not, however, intend to make these assertions without providing any evidence to back them up. On the page User:IntoThinAir/ITNC analysis, I have attempted to compile all discretionary ITNC nominations so far in 2024 (I am also trying to compile all such nominations in 2023 at User:IntoThinAir/ITNC analysis/2023). By "discretionary", I mean nominations that are not automatically deemed notable enough to post, so I am excluding RD nominations (where the only requirement is notability of the deceased individual) and anything listed on WP:ITNR (which is, by definition, always considered notable enough to post). And in 2024 so far, there have been only 23 discretionary nominations from the United States (two of which I nominated myself), and only three of those were posted: Voyager 1, the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, and the Vulcan Centaur rocket launch.

Now that RD is no longer discretionary, the only factor that varies from one nomination to another is if someone is notable enough for a blurb, which requires an extremely high level of prestige. At User:IntoThinAir/RD blurbs, I have attempted to compile all RD nominations where the subject was specifically nominated for a blurb, i.e. those where at least one person proposed posting their death as a blurb because they thought they were important enough. I have included all the ones I could find going back to the start of 2022, so well over the last two years now. And sure enough, only 6 of the 41 nominations (14.6%) from the US were posted as blurbs, compared to 34 of the 105 (32.4%) total.