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NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

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Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#131

Post by denton-scratch »

grumbel wrote: post #125
denton-scratch wrote: post #104

"Unbiased" news is impossible; the reporter has biases, the editor has biases, the publisher has biases; which they may or may not be aware of. The biases they don't know about are the most insidious. So I'm most suspicious of sources that brag about their objectivity. I prefer sources that wear their bias on their sleeve (provided they're actually news sources, and not overt propaganda or gutter tabloids).

I'd much rather have one that tried to be objective, than just one that embraces their bias. The later one will always be terrible at reporting. The former at least has a chance of being good. Seriously, the bar is not exactly high. Start with telling me where and when something happen, make a time line if it's a series of events. Tell me who is involved. Don't dress it in flowery language, make it as simple as possi…

> So far Wikipedia is the only one that gets somewhat close to this ideal.

Wikipedia now has this expectation that any claim that's at all surprising or interesting should be cited to "reliable sources". I don't entirely agree with WP's notion of what sources are to be considered reliable, but at least the policy is out there, and can be debated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

This citation policy wasn't always there, and it has made a huge difference. For example, anyone can come along and remove surprising statements from articles if they aren't supported by a reliable source. That in turn means that if you find a statement surprising, you can go and check the source.

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#132

Post by denton-scratch »

Loquebantur wrote: post #126
denton-scratch wrote: post #104

"Unbiased" news is impossible; the reporter has biases, the editor has biases, the publisher has biases; which they may or may not be aware of. The biases they don't know about are the most insidious. So I'm most suspicious of sources that brag about their objectivity. I prefer sources that wear their bias on their sleeve (provided they're actually news sources, and not overt propaganda or gutter tabloids).

The bias in news reporting is an aspect of the sentiment the respective individuals have towards that news. Socially, that bias is a more important part than the news' factual content itself, making comments here about how to "eliminate" it appear as a weird display of cluelessness. People rightfully wish for a harmonious society. Eliminating other people's utterances of discontent is an approach usually employed in…

> an aspect of the sentiment the respective individuals

I disagree. I'm a regular reader of Guardian Online; that organ has multiple institutional biases. Stories get spiked if they don't align with that bias. Reporters are forced out if they fail to toe the line.

It's not just The Guardian; all commercial news sources share this property.

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#133

Post by jacooper »

Personally I think the most dangerous kind of bias is financial biases.

Luckily there are multiple news orgs not beholden such things like Al-Jazeera, although its funded by the qatari government its practically independent with many awards and reporting representing the middle east, that's why they were able to stand against american lies in Iraq(to the point the U.S. requited Qatar to limit them), and truly cover the occupation in Palestine.

Just don't trust their reporting about Qatar.

Here a good video about Qatar and why Aljazeera exists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKx7TPGttSk

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#134

Post by Loquebantur »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #61
numbsafari wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as unbiased news. Anyone claiming to be unbiased, rather than wearing their biases on their sleeves, is lying to you, or themselves, or they are just ignorant. Likely some combination of all three.

"Unbiased" is like absolute zero. You never actually get there, but don't think there is no distinction between putting in an effort to make something decently cold, and hurling it into the sun.

Imagine, you had some tool affording you complete information about everything happening on earth, aided by some AI that only tells the truth about anything when asked.

You would still have to pose the right questions or risk dying in ignorance.

People's complaints here about bias is really about being manipulated successfully by parts of society working actively in their own, markedly different, interests.

Those won't just go away. Aligning interests doesn't happen by providing facts.

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#135

Post by osigurdson »

arcanemachiner wrote: post #57
osigurdson wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always wondered why anyone bothers asking ChatGPT these kinds of questions. Where is the utility?

Maybe I'm having a bad day and I just need to hear a rap song about how cool Donald Trump is, to help boost my mood.

I agree that there is value in humor. I find that ChatGPT humor gets old pretty quickly however.

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#136

Post by ryanbrunner »

blackbear_ wrote: post #97
strogonoff wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think that unbiased news is an intractable problem purely based on information theory: to have an unbiased picture of the world, you need to have all the facts, which is physically impossible; and any layer that simplifies those facts (be it a journalist or an LLM) will add bias (either by journalist, journalist’s employer, LLM’s training data or operator preferences, and so on). In short, when your selecti…

Technically speaking, if every day you take an uniformly random selection of news articles, on average what you read will not be biased. Or, to be precise, it will follow the same biases as the population of news articles you sample from.

It's almost impossible to arrive at a pure random sampling like that. As an easy example, if you limit yourself to English news articles, you're going to have a pretty large bias towards "the West", which right now probably includes a strong bias against China or Russian's viewpoints on things (not to say that including those viewpoints would be more truthful necessarily, but certainly less biased).

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#137

Post by ryanbrunner »

ethbr0 wrote: post #124
strogonoff wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, the first challenge to unbiased approach would be the impossible in practical terms task of separating facts from fiction. I don’t know if it is clear but I really meant it that unbiased news is not a possibility due to fundamental limitations of information theory and finiteness of individual information processing capabilities; self-awareness and bias transparency is the only way. > helpful reduction of maj…

In your original (upthread) argument that "unbiased news is not a possibility", are you stating that as a fundamental consequence of the news' lossy compression of {all facts} into a smaller product... or something else? It's unclear. As for averaging out, yes, the vector model was what I was using internally. Disclosure: I'm US-based, so our politics are traditionally bipolar as a result of our election system (in c…

> Disclosure: I'm US-based, so our politics are traditionally bipolar as a result of our election system (in contrast to Europe et al.).

There's a whole lot of bias that's "baked in" with US politics / media. There's broad consensus on neoliberal capitalism, personal freedoms vs collectivism, common ground on opposing states like Russia and China.

On a few wedge issues you will average out to a common ground, but ultimately you're not eliminating bias, you're just eliminating a relatively small bias between left-wing and right-wing US and replacing it with an "overall US" bias.

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#138

Post by heresie-dabord »

denton-scratch wrote: post #104

"Unbiased" news is impossible; the reporter has biases, the editor has biases, the publisher has biases; which they may or may not be aware of. The biases they don't know about are the most insidious. So I'm most suspicious of sources that brag about their objectivity. I prefer sources that wear their bias on their sleeve (provided they're actually news sources, and not overt propaganda or gutter tabloids).

> propaganda or gutter tabloids

As an experiment, let's just think of the news industry as specialising in those two business lines. ^_^

Bias cannot be eliminated from the news business -- bias is the business. Even the sincerity of declared bias is no guarantee of good faith/ethics.

Consider the challenges that Wikipedia faces trying to represent knowledge about history and events in an objective manner.

"News" means different scope at different levels of conception.

    * NL0 = personal, individual; at this level, "news" is the for-profit business of feeding (and shaping) the individual mass of feelings and stubborn opinions; the only objective things at NL0 are Maslow's hierarchy and *the local weather*.

    * NL1 = regional power structure; at this level, "news" becomes part of regional economics, social policy, and broad weather patterns; political theatre begins obvious pandering at this level. 

    * NL2 = national power structure; at this level, national economic and social policy, regional economic tensions, perspective of international power structures and spheres of influence; political pandering is intense. 

    * NL3 = international power structures; at this level, various nations compete and/or cooperate economically and militarily; there are spheres of geopolitical influence.
News business will ally itself with a power structure. This is where democracy, for all its challenges, is still the best hope of any free (or free-ish) society.[1]

News "for the people" really depends on how militant the people are prepared to be.

So, for the most part, power structures write the news. State-funded news is only as reliable as popular confidence in the state providing the funding.[2]

[1] _ https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...

[2] _ https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#139

Post by pydry »

mynameishere wrote: post #92
echelon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unbiased news algorithm: 1. Identify all clusters of power and opinion, eg. Republicans, Democrats, Chinese Communist Party, UK Labour Party, Green Party, etc. 2. Associate each cluster with news organizations that tightly align with their policies. 3. Evaluate stories - headlines in only one cluster (under reported elsewhere) represent a view. Headlines that have different takes, likewise, give you a spectrum of tho…

Your "etc" includes some very powerful ethnic groups. Are you planning on "identifying" them? I didn't think so.

It would probably include some institutions masquerading as representatives of ethnic groups but that isnt quite the same thing.

Re: NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

#140

Post by newsnotfound »

AiaAidan wrote: post #21

As someone who has worked in the media industry, I can tell you that the problem with unbiased news goes much deeper than simply presenting facts objectively. The very first step mentioned in your breakdown - scraping the latest headlines from publicly available news sites - is inherently biased, because it relies on a small selection of sources to determine what is considered newsworthy. But by whom? In reality, edi…

Because the project is small right now (and makes no money), I've included a very limited list of sources for each category, however at scale we would have alot of options for getting past this.

For example, one way in theory is to scrape all known publicly available news sites and create an article for every single detected story, but this would be very expensive.

As someone with experience in the media, what steps would you take to find these under-reported stories? Maybe the steps can be replicated with AI to increase coverage?

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