Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

Hi all,

I have the feeling that in the last few years all political discussions have become more extreme. People from the left think that all the people from the right are evil and vice versa. Our filter bubbles don't help with this issue. That's why I built "Their news". With "Their News" you discover news from the entire political spectrum without any filter bubbles. My recommendation is that you try out different hot political topics and compare the most extreme political positions. It's super interesting to see how news from the left and news from the right report the same events differently.

I thought about if I could somehow monetize the website, but I read somewhere (I think it was in the book "Range" by David Epstein) that it is probably impossible to do so. In the book, the author spoke about a study where researchers offered to give the participants a small cash amount if they read some articles that is in direct opposition to their beliefs. The participants declined. This means that even though I think "Their News" was a super interesting project to work on, I probably could not get people to use it even if I paid them to .

Behind the scenes: It uses the media bias rankings from adfontesmedia as well as a news API by newscatcher (they were awesome and helped me a lot. Go check them out!). You are presented with a slider with a few dots. Each dot represents a news outlet (e.g. Reuters, Forbes etc). The news articles are shown below the slider always come from news outlets close to the slider. The entire project is 100% open-source (but contains a lot of spaghetti code ) on my github page (https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews).

I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have. Cheers Philipp

You probably don't know this.. https://www.allsides.com

Very cool! How are you scraping the news sites? Are you using an API?

It's been fun playing around with it, thanks for putting this together, it's nice work.

I have a couple of observations: firstly, it's interesting that the Guardian is considered to be dead-centre, while most in the UK would say that it's quite on the left. I found that surprising.

Also, I guess this analysis is taken from the perspective of the USA, given the chart on adfontesmedia. The definition of left and right (at least the Overton window) differs somewhat by country, and I feel that should be made clear on your site for global visitors.

On the topic of differences, I spotted Al Jazeera on there and it made me recall that 'Al Jazeera Arabic vs Al Jazeera English' has now become somewhat of a meme, with the former being anything but progressive: https://twitter.com/search?q=al%20jazeera%20arabic%20vs%20al...

That again just makes me think of how news outlets change their reporting depending on the audience. I'm not sure if that changes anything for you though.

This reminds me of a 1980s magazine called World Press Review. WPR would take a number of topics every month. For each topic they would print a number of editorials from various points of view. Each editorial was accompanied by the source's masthead and a short note about the source's political perspective.

For the most part they used the labels each source used to describe itself (conservative, libertarian, socialist, labor, etc) rather than words like "left" or "right".

What I liked about WPR was that you got a sense that the world was more complex than a simple one-dimensional binary left/right, black/white, true/false.

I believe that left/right language obscures this complexity. Worse, labels like "extreme left" and "leans right" and assert that there is a "center" or a default. "Centrism" or "moderate" is really just a cluster of political positions, though they may be the most common ones.

The real world is not binary left/right. It's more like Princess Mononoke, with the wolves, the boars, the apes, the Imperial soldiers, the humans of Iron Town, the human raised by wolves, and the last Emishi prince.

Update: WPR lives on as Worldpress.org but seems to now carry mostly original content rather than reprints.