Hey all,
Co-founder of NewsCatcher. The author uses our News API to power this website.
In case you want to do something similar, we did a fully free news api for all non-commercial use-cases (no credit card required):
Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
51–60 of 128 posts
Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're using outlet/organization level bias ratings to assign bias ratings to individual articles on a specific topic? Can't it vary by topic, author, or even what facts are represented (used, excluded, or wrong)? For example, when I looked at the articles in the middle of the slider, it seemed that they were more of a mix of left and right leaning articles, not necessarily middle ground articles (and seemed to be…
> Can't it vary by topic, author, or even what facts are represented (used, excluded, or wrong)? That'd be great but would require someone to review each article, which is probably out of scope for this one-person project.
Unless using machine learning to process based on more granular criteria.
Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you're using outlet/organization level bias ratings to assign bias ratings to individual articles on a specific topic? Can't it vary by topic, author, or even what facts are represented (used, excluded, or wrong)? For example, when I looked at the articles in the middle of the slider, it seemed that they were more of a mix of left and right leaning articles, not necessarily middle ground articles (and seemed to be…
Exactly. The biases are per news source and actually constant: https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews/blob/0c4c6a932a... I'm sure they are eventually updated, but making a general judgment per news source to show individual articles means it will occasionally be wrong and misleading for the reader. The name alone, "their news", suggests an us vs. them mentality that we could use less of these days. For once I t…
"But honestly? We shouldn't bother. Consume every new information with a critical mind, and don't expect editorials to do the thinking for you."
I completely agree.
Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s what popping a filter bubble feels like. I followed Jacobin and a bunch of other accounts of people I disagree with when I started on Twitter. Learning more about people who hate you, your philosophy, beliefs and identities does not lead to any great improvements in your life so I stopped. Yes, the politically engaged out group really is like that. They really do hate you.
If just for fun, as a kind of thought experiment I suppose, a person decomposed this comment, unpacking each word or phrase into its pedantically precise meaning in this context, spending several hours on the task to squeeze every last drop of unambiguous meaning out of the the words, and then contemplated a literal reading of the final product in its uncompressed form...might this undertaking yield any interesting r…
There are many, many people who would happily put you and your family in a gulag or concentration camp for your political beliefs if you have any, whatever they are. There are lots of people who believe that achieving their utopia is worth a lot of dead men, women and children. This is true whether you would pick the fascists or the communists given a forced choice between the two.
Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
If just for fun, as a kind of thought experiment I suppose, a person decomposed this comment, unpacking each word or phrase into its pedantically precise meaning in this context, spending several hours on the task to squeeze every last drop of unambiguous meaning out of the the words, and then contemplated a literal reading of the final product in its uncompressed form...might this undertaking yield any interesting r…
There are many, many people who would happily put you and your family in a gulag or concentration camp for your political beliefs if you have any, whatever they are. There are lots of people who believe that achieving their utopia is worth a lot of dead men, women and children. This is true whether you would pick the fascists or the communists given a forced choice between the two.
I'm not saying it isn't plausible, and history contains many examples of such behavior, but my point is that the mind has this ability to imagine various scenarios of what could be true, but we speak of these neurologically generated virtual scenarios as if they are actually true. In this example, you even literally use the word "true" when referring to these ideas, demonstrating how real these simulated scenarios seem - to the mind, they are often indistinguishable from actual knowledge and first person experiences.
This phenomenon is ever present in human behavior, in everything we do. In science, engineering, manufacturing, and "most" activities that humans engage in within the economic sphere, we typically apply fairly rigorous scrutiny to competing theories (consciously controlled imaginations) about the current and potential future states of reality, and as a result we tend to produce high quality and sometimes even amazing results (splitting the atom, landing robots on Mars, antibiotics & vaccines, the internet, etc)...but when it comes to normal day to day activities (our "actual lives", the underlying reason most people do all these other things at our place of employment), we seem to not only not apply similar levels of scrutiny to our thinking, but most people seem to consider the very idea to be outrageous, often passionately so.
I think it's an interesting way to think about the world. Perhaps there is even some future value in thinking about the world in different ways, as there has been in the past.
Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Who? Both Ad Fontes and AllSides say that The Guardian merely skews to the left, and Ad Fontes' analysis concludes that it's one of the "most reliable". (Ad Fontes' analysis here: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-guardian-…
I think that mostly shows the limits of their analysis. The Guardian is basically the left-wing paper in the UK; I don't think there's anything to the left of them outside of fairly fringe, niche, and very fragmented publications. Internal disputes within the left play out within their comment section, whilst the news section often seems to attacking the right wing as its main goal.
> I think that mostly shows the limits of their analysis. The Guardian is basically the left-wing paper in the UK; I don't think there's anything to the left of them outside of fairly fringe, niche, and very fragmented publications. Internal disputes within the left play out within their comment section, whilst the news section often seems to attacking the right wing as its main goal.
This only reinforces the meta-point. Everyone's sharing their perception without citing anything. So far, the few research entities looking into media bias are all asserting (with randomly sampled data points as best as I can tell) that The Guardian presents reliable news with a left-leaning opinion skew, whereas self-selected commenters (i.e. those who chose to reply to my initial comment) here are asserting from their own perception that The Guardian's "basically the left-wing paper," "editorial is usually pretty far left," and "quite on the left."
There's value in learning the methodologies employed by these analysis firms and think tanks, deciding whether you agree with how their analysis is performed, and upon deciding, either performing the same (time consuming) analysis yourself or delegating to the group(s) who's methods you most align with. That's largely why I'm fine with Ad Fontes. I haven't looked into how AllSides draws their conclusions, but either way, they're both in agreement re: The Guardian.
This is a healthier way to conclude how a news outlet leans compared to just going by our own perception.
Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
#57I appreciate the idea, but there are various conceptual problems when presenting political bias this way. 1. "Left" and "right" on their own are too vague to be useful. 2. There is a difference between party affiliation/apologism and political views. 3. "Left" and "right" news sources, as conventionally understood, would show a wildly asymmetrical data plot. 4. There are multiple dimensions to political views.
I agree with your points. I still think the idea and implementation is right ( it is informative and if you live in US, you can figure it out ). It is kinda funny, because I was trying to explain a friend in US political formations in the old country the other day and even though we have 2 major parties there too, in US they would both be realistically considered left-wing.
Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. Who? Both Ad Fontes and AllSides say that The Guardian merely skews to the left, and Ad Fontes' analysis concludes that it's one of the "most reliable". (Ad Fontes' analysis here: https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-guardian-…
Tory UK tends to characterize the Guardian as raving lefty lunatics, just as the right characterizes the NYT in the US.
Not lunatics but very raving leftist for the last four years.
Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
#59Hi 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…
this is cool. i would actually like to see just the news like this, vs searching for a topic. rather than going to a particular outlet for my news, aggregate a center-ist list of news articles, so I can visit that instead of various news outlets directly
Re: Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
#60This is a noble goal, but when I clicked on the website a few times (admittedly, only looked at about 10 articles) I ended up with a very "left" view. I do not think it is skewed by personal views -- you could see clearly who is considered evil just from the title. Also, not to knock down the effort, but I think this can cause more outrage, by showing that the other side "is wrong" than grow sanity. Just due to the f…
well reality is famously known to have a 'liberal bias'
You've really missed the point here.