Parliament Pulse — Methodology

Parliament Pulse is a media-coverage tone tracker — NOT a statistical opinion poll. It measures how a fixed list of Kenyan newsrooms covered Parliament. It does not measure public opinion, approval, or what Kenyans think — newsroom coverage is not a random sample of anyone, and we never present it as one.

This page documents the classification pipeline and its thresholds, so you can judge the figures on the Overview tab for yourself. Those figures are published. Two things limit what you see there, and both are described below: an item's tone is machine-assigned and must survive review before it appears, and no average is calculated from a sample too small to mean anything.

The pipeline, step by step

Traceability

Every row retains its source outlet, publication date and source URL, and the Overview tab links each item back to the article it came from, so any figure here can be traced to the reporting behind it. Media tone is never written into Mzalendo's record of what Parliament did: it sits in its own store, labelled as coverage, and it never establishes a fact about a member, a Bill or a vote.

Which sources we use

The current active allowlist as configured in this system:

Topics tracked

What this can and cannot tell you

It can tell you how allowlisted Kenyan newsrooms have been covering Parliament and its business, and how that tone shifts over time. It cannot tell you what Kenyans think, how popular anyone is, or how a vote would go — it is not a survey, has no sampling frame, and should never be quoted as “public opinion” or “approval”. Corrections are welcome via Contact.