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Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?

#11

Post by harigov »

return0 wrote: post #9

I think the tool you need is "skepticism". Teach people to not rush to ascribe labels to everything they don't like, and to stop ignoring anything that has been labeled as X-ist by their bubble. Teach people to not think with slogans and hashtags or listen to celebrities.

Well, that may work but you also need to have intellectual resources to be able to process all the information and see something for what it really is. Also, people serving news are upping the game by using the latest in psychology research to influence us. We need _somebody_ on our side.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?

#12

Post by iaw »

What I've wanted for a while was a curated news source that allowed me to collapse topics (e.g. only one story about the presidential race per day). The goal would be to present both "perspectives" as well as identify the core shared truths between the two.

The problem is cross-article context comparison is actually a bit harder than news article summarization and the amount of time required to pursue it made it seem a bit too much of a chore.

One extension would fall to politicians and public entities that make statements where it could validate/compare their statements to their historic actions. Beyond the "is this reporting accurate" it would go into "do we think this actor is being truthful based on historic behavior"

Edit: The other nice thing about this is that I could hear about the things that aren't the recent election cycle or terrorist attack. It's like sensationalist news signals were saturated which raised the noise floor drowning out all of the other news.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?

#13

Post by rando9000 »

harigov wrote: post #7
noname123 wrote: post #5

This is a pretty good website and they also have a proprietary algorithm to determine the political spectrum of the source: http://www.allsides.com/ NYTimes is ranked moderately liberal while Fox News is ranked right ( http://www.allsides.com/bias/bias-ratings )

Thanks! It seems interesting. The problem I see is that - it's hard to pull people away from their news sources to something unbiased. We need to take unbiased articles to the people. Also, journals shouldn't be the only source. Every side needs to be heard and someone's voice may come from their own blog. I am not sure how it would work but we should at least give it a try.

I'm curious how you think this would work.

First of all, I'm interested in what you think a news publication free of bias would look like. Would it be a straight recitation of factual occurrences? That would be useless, right? How would you decide which story gets a big headline? Which detail gets included?

Second, the USA Right in general has completely broken with the idea that there is any such thing as "fact" that matters. Evidence, etc. is irrelevant. Look at the Right's views on climate change, etc. I'm sure there are people on Hacker News etc. who will be like "now you're just being a Bias Liberal!" if I don't say "the Left has its problems too" but the Left's problems, such as they are, are the traditional problems of political parties: maybe the Left's policy prescriptions won't work, maybe their need to maintain a coalition means they aren't able to address Problem P, etc.

The Right in the USA is unique in having decided that there is no evidentiary standard high enough when Rightist positions conflict with reality. So removing bias from news sources and ensuring everything is quite factual won't affect the ~40% or so of the USA who frankly couldn't give a flying fuck about reality.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone interested in building tools for showing bias in news?

#20

Post by harigov »

rando9000 wrote: post #13
harigov wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! It seems interesting. The problem I see is that - it's hard to pull people away from their news sources to something unbiased. We need to take unbiased articles to the people. Also, journals shouldn't be the only source. Every side needs to be heard and someone's voice may come from their own blog. I am not sure how it would work but we should at least give it a try.

I'm curious how you think this would work. First of all, I'm interested in what you think a news publication free of bias would look like. Would it be a straight recitation of factual occurrences? That would be useless, right? How would you decide which story gets a big headline? Which detail gets included? Second, the USA Right in general has completely broken with the idea that there is any such thing as "fact" tha…

I am not interested in unbiased news sources. I am interested in showing alternately biased news source so that you can develop your own opinion. Even showing snippets of alternate views superposed on the same article can help people a bit.

My aim is not to solve the problem in its entirety. If others cannot understand our opinion, we should at least try to understand theirs. The current situation is horrible in terms of people not even having a clue as to what's going on. If 10% benefit from this, that means there are 10% of people who at least know both/many sides.

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