previous discussion on the same repo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22407835
Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
121–130 of 203 posts
Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
#122Earlier 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…
Sorry, I have to respectfully disagree. This is the model that PBS Nightly News takes: let both sides of an issue talk and treat everyone respectfully. Compare this to MSNBC and Fox News whose business models are really the same: cater to their viewers’ dogma/bubble and reinforce biases, and don’t try to introduce new ideas because it is bad for their business.
I don’t live in the US, so please take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. I imagine you are a smart and decent person on the other side of this screen.
Usually print media is considered higher quality journalism than TV media. There are numerous studies that show reading print media leads to people being more informed than just watching TV news. Whether this is correlation or causation I can’t really say.
My understanding of both Fox and MSNBC is they are entertainment programs, not so much news programs. I’m not sure it’s fair to compare those to anything in print, nor do I think it’s entirely possible.
A good news article might present both sides of a story, but try to fact-check claims by both sides, and bring in supporting evidence. That’s the key differentiating factor of quality journalism - helping bring facts to the forefront rather than let people on either side spin the facts for their purposes.
Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
People don’t know what is fact and what is fiction. Giving 50/50 air time to climate scientists and climate change deniers is on one side presenting facts and on the other total bullshit and saying “hey these are both valid opinions- you decide”.
This isn't climate scientists vs deniers this is major news organisations on both sides; both of which are guilty of presenting total bullshit as facts. Allowing them to be viewed side-by-side permits users to to get a better image of who is willing to miss-lead on which subjects and get facts that have been omitted by the other side.
Just because one side might be more willing to mislead doesn't mean that their stance on a topic is more likely to be the incorrect one.
Showing which news sources employ the most underhanded rhetorical devices may be a positive goal in itself, but it doesn't, by itself, help the audience make their own determination on an issue. Even more of an issue is that a viewer's determination of which source is more willing to mislead or omit relevant details is much more likely to be influenced by prior opinion than by the content of either source.
Basically, the problem isn't, in itself, biased news sourced, its that the format is fundamentally ill-suited towards giving individuals enough information to come to a reasonably well-supported position on just about any topic of moderate complexity. Further take any topic that appears to be of simple complexity and scratch the surface a bit and there's a decent chance it will turn out to be not so simple.
Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
#124What does the normalized news means? Able to query from a predefined RSS feed? Because I was expecting news coverage from different partisan source pointing to the same news event.
Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
#125Earlier 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…
> 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. Is there data that show CNN debates on climate change correlate with a decrease in belief in climate change? This sounds like folk lore rather than reality to me, but I could be wrong.
You're questioning the conclusion rather than the premise(s). It's problem more helpful to look at the premises rather than extrapolating into an argument about the impacts of a particular debate style on popular opinion.
Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
#126For 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…
The "wisdom of crowds" thing is supposed to work like those fairground games of guessing the number of sweets in the jar; everyone has their own answer, but you'd expect the answers to be roughly in a normal distribution around the true mean.
Suppose you have a bunch of sincere answers of 1867, 1957, 2101, 2057 sweets, and then someone comes along with an answer of two million. They get a bunch of astroturf accounts, a few celebrity retweets, and suddenly thousands of people are claiming the answer to be two million, skewing the average up. They can even start using the fact that the other answers are different from each other and the average as evidence of their bias!
It is extremely difficult to determine honest effort vs dishonest spin, but it's absolutely vital to the process because you have to exclude the spin guys and all their sockpuppets before you do any kind of averaging or consensus.
Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, I have to respectfully disagree. This is the model that PBS Nightly News takes: let both sides of an issue talk and treat everyone respectfully. Compare this to MSNBC and Fox News whose business models are really the same: cater to their viewers’ dogma/bubble and reinforce biases, and don’t try to introduce new ideas because it is bad for their business.
I don’t live in the US, so please take what I’m saying with a grain of salt. I imagine you are a smart and decent person on the other side of this screen. Usually print media is considered higher quality journalism than TV media. There are numerous studies that show reading print media leads to people being more informed than just watching TV news. Whether this is correlation or causation I can’t really say. My under…
+1 thanks for the great reply.
Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And the better alternative is...? Actively researching both sources and stories, and not being a passive consumer who expects someone else to spoon-feed you a solution.
You have the time to dredge up sources and check their veracity every time you read an article? Often sources are private but verified by the journalist. This is why journalism exists and has a code of ethics. You can’t just look every claim up on Wikipedia.
I'm talking about your sources (i.e., media outlets), not an articles sources.
Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
#129Seems like a repost of previous Show HN [1].
Re: Show HN: Python package to collect normalized news from almost any website
#130Hi looks interesting and useful! What's the differences between newscatcher (python) vs. newscatcherapi.com? Is there any limit on using newscatcher (python) as shown in the pricing pages? Also, I was looking at https://newsapi.org . How does your python API compare? I see that in newsapi, it also get old articles; do you implement similar features?
There's seems to have a lot of news crawler APIs lately, a quite google and found these:
[1] https://currentsapi.services/en/product/price