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Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

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Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#141

Post by anaphor »

oceanbreeze83 wrote: post #5

For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources for any story and displays them altogether on one page. My approach has been, if we can't get neutral/objective coverage, getting comprehensive, 360 desgree coverage is a good alternative. These days, news bias is not only in the way a story is covered, but also which stories are covered. So, maagnit automatic…

FYI, I'm not sure what the site is doing but it ended up using up a ton of memory and I had to kill firefox to unlock my desktop (FF 76, Arch Linux).

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#142

Post by marcosdumay »

sdan wrote: post #34
oceanbreeze83 wrote: post #5

For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources for any story and displays them altogether on one page. My approach has been, if we can't get neutral/objective coverage, getting comprehensive, 360 desgree coverage is a good alternative. These days, news bias is not only in the way a story is covered, but also which stories are covered. So, maagnit automatic…

That’s great. Nothing is never neutral so it’s best to show different sides of issues to make readers figure it out themselves (as easily as possible, but not as opinionated as popular news outlets)

There are a bunch of fallacies on the work here.

There aren't usually 2 sides to a debate. The number of sides varies wildly and some times is even 1.

All sides on a debate are not equal. There are perfectly fine reasons to honestly disagree about issues, but there are plenty of dishonest ones, and there is way too much dishonest coverage of things on the news; there are plenty of uninformed people with opinions that don't hold any water; and there are plenty of people just not interested on truth.

Always putting 2 sides on equal footing in a debate is dishonest. It's made to have the appearance of a honest debate, while suffering from the same problems of a single sided view.

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#144

Post by hunters_tryst »

yomly wrote: post #67
doublesCs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a terrible idea to me. The two sides are at war, and if the way you sample them is by going 50-50, that encourages them to be more extreme because that will skew the average in their direction. We already see this in the media. You have the host and two people. Lets hear what person A says, lets hear what person B says. Who's right? Impossible to tell, otherwise you must be biased. And no mention that pers…

To be honest I don't find "verifiable fact" to be worth much these days. If coronavirus has done anything it has highlighted how easy it is to do wrong. Journalists and politicians alike getting drawing incorrect insights from data. Meanwhile so little of the data surrounding coronavirus is comparable. You have countries only recording cases if the patient was hospitalised (not if they tested positive) and cause of d…

Antibody studies from Spain and elsewhere show only ~5% of population of these 'hard-hit' nations has had the virus. This confirms a mortality rate of about 1% when the national epidemic has a bad first wave but limited medical system overwhelm, followed by a severe lockdown.

Best guess given herd immunity kicks in at about 85% of pop infected is about 260,000 deaths with a 1% mortality rate. With these figures 500,000 deaths is a 1.9% mortality rate - high but still possible.

contextualise everything with this 5% figure - the US, and everywhere else, is much closer to the beginning of this than to the end.

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#145

Post by hitpointdrew »

SoylentOrange wrote: post #83
oceanbreeze83 wrote: post #5

For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources for any story and displays them altogether on one page. My approach has been, if we can't get neutral/objective coverage, getting comprehensive, 360 desgree coverage is a good alternative. These days, news bias is not only in the way a story is covered, but also which stories are covered. So, maagnit automatic…

When I was a kid CNN used to do this: they would invite a single climate scientist and a single climate change skeptic and have them make their points on equal time. CNN would then say “who’s right? You decide.” And the program would end. This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen a…

> This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism.

So CNN should get to decide what is correct? Go fuck yourself, and learn how to think. If CNN's audiance can't make their own decisions then that is the fault of the audience not CNN. We don't need, and should abhor, "gatekeepers" of information.

Having two opposing sides is 100% the correct way to do journalism.

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#146

Post by zzuko »

There is a similar library for this called newspaper which I had used in my undergrad thesis. Not dismissing this work, but I am curious about what it is offering on top of it? It doesn't offer a comparison to the newspaper, at least not in the Github page.

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#147

Post by etangent »

SoylentOrange wrote: post #83
oceanbreeze83 wrote: post #5

For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources for any story and displays them altogether on one page. My approach has been, if we can't get neutral/objective coverage, getting comprehensive, 360 desgree coverage is a good alternative. These days, news bias is not only in the way a story is covered, but also which stories are covered. So, maagnit automatic…

When I was a kid CNN used to do this: they would invite a single climate scientist and a single climate change skeptic and have them make their points on equal time. CNN would then say “who’s right? You decide.” And the program would end. This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen a…

Are you implying there is only one side one must be allowed to take on climate change?

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#148

Post by PaulHoule »

nojito wrote: post #94
SoylentOrange wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid CNN used to do this: they would invite a single climate scientist and a single climate change skeptic and have them make their points on equal time. CNN would then say “who’s right? You decide.” And the program would end. This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen a…

The current status quo on the internet is infinitely worse than that though. The internet and social media allow you to ignore the correct conclusion because it makes a person uncomfortable with the idea that they could be wrong when everything they read reinforces that incorrect conclusion.

Hard to say.

By far the worst actor I've seen is (old media) Rush Limbaugh. It's hard to believe that Rush could believe that America faces any threats (e.g. war, crime, economic, environmental) other than the "Democrat party." You'd imagine that he wants to see a system more like Japan (liberalism with one party) or China (one party, no rights, no dissent.)

More generally I see the problem of "spamming the agenda", combined with the "if it bleeds it leads" tendency of the media.

Before Trump ran for president CNN's ratings were in the toilet, and it lumbered on between school shootings and MH370. To report on things like that you might have to take the Redeye from Atlanta to a flyover state, but today you can sit your ass in Atlanta or Washington DC and just cover 'what trump said', and 'what somebody said about what trump said'.

Since the election, the news has seemed to be "broken" in the way that a "clock" breaks. Arstechnica's Dealmaster always has a sale on Amazon Fire devices, Anker power banks, Xbox Gold, and whatever craptop Lenovo has a surplus over. The banner on CNN often seems to go unchanged for weeks. (e.g. "TRUMP WANTED TO FIRE MULLER")

COVID-19 was the first real news in a long term, but there is an obsession about "what trump said" compared to the other 300 million Americans. Trump doesn't really care if it is good or bad news, he just wants to be in the news, and if he held a press conference and nobody came, that would bring him to tears.

Similarly there is always some article pushed by a right wing group that says there is too much occupational licensing in the U.S (maybe true, but the same editorial turns up every month as if it was fresh) or that there is a trade-off between economic efficiency and inequality. (e.g. the evidence is that if you have too much inequality people tilt the scales, rich people buy T-bills depressing interest rates, and try to keep the action for themselves and their children... One of those reasons why Stalin invented the Purge)

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#149

Post by shuntress »

ivanhoe wrote: post #140
dgb23 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem OP describes is real though. The question is 'How far can you go?' For example does it make sense to present advocates for science and pseudo-science on the same level, with equal weight? Putting a Biologist who explains Evolution on the same pedestal on equal time as a Priest who believes in Intelligent Design creates a false sense of balance between these viewpoints, even though these viewpoints are fun…

We can spin it the other way too: Should people be fed only with information approved by some TV boards or government committees? Are we adults expected to vote, but not allowed and/or trusted anymore to make our own mind on what we believe in? And even more importantly do you realize that in such world it's far more likely that only a priest will get invited to a TV show, not the biologist? Because that's the "how f…

There is a middle ground between presenting one-and-only-one viewpoint or presenting every possible viewpoint with implied equal validity.

For example: Given two commentators, if one is arguing that TV boards and government committees are supposed to be populated by and representative of the general population and the other arguing that TV boards and government committees are populated by crab people secretly supporting the illuminati; the discussion should be about how effectively TV boards and government committees are being filled by the general population and how effective they are at articulating societal consensus related to important issues.

In the "gotta hear both sides" world, rational discussion is dragged off the table by the notion that every issue has two equally valid sides no matter how absurd one "side" might be.

Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website

#150

Post by shuntress »

etangent wrote: post #147
SoylentOrange wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid CNN used to do this: they would invite a single climate scientist and a single climate change skeptic and have them make their points on equal time. CNN would then say “who’s right? You decide.” And the program would end. This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen a…

Are you implying there is only one side one must be allowed to take on climate change?

Are you implying that "climate change is real" and "climate change is a hoax" must be treated as two equally valid opposing sides?
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