There is widespread concern that the social media ecosystem drives users to engage with like-minded news articles, thereby fostering polarization in news consumption. Methodological limitations in estimating slant at the article level have made evaluating these claims difficult. We use data on the near universe (ca. 1 million) of hard news articles published online by the top 100 U.S. news outlets in 2019, together with recent advances in natural language processing, to obtain a content-based