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NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company

newsnotfound.com

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

#161

Post by denton-scratch »

Loquebantur wrote: post #143
denton-scratch wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I meant "respective individuals" in the sense, it's lastly humans being responsible for the written piece of news. I find it very curious you would single out "The Guardian" of all publications. That organ is maybe the most independent one you will find today. It is owned by "The Scott Trust Limited", successor of the similarly named trust created to shield it from commercial interests. Calling it a "commercial news…

I singled out The Guardian because it's the one I read daily, to learn what happened yesterday.

The Guardian (and The Scott Trust) is institutionally biased. It backed the Balfour Declaration, and to this day it remains pro-zionist. It's also pro-war, and backed the invasion of Iraq. It's got a lot worse since the Assange dremels-and-angle-grinders affair; it has become the primary mouthpiece of the UK security services.

It has the reputation of being a leftie paper; but that's an illusion. It holds up the left end of the Overton Window, and reliably backs the extreme right wing of the Labour Party. Its attacks on Jeremy Corbyn were consistent and cringe-making; even the token leftists in the newsroom were forced to join the pile-in.

I call it a commercial news source, because that's exactly what it is; it's a business.

I don't call any source "unbiased"; as I said up-thread, I don't think unbiased reporting is possible.

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

#162

Post by newsnotfound »

wolverine876 wrote: post #5
newsnotfound wrote: post #2

Imagine you could see into the minds of news reporters - their intentions, thought processes, and emotions when writing articles. This would allow us to hold reporters accountable for bias, misinformation, and sensationalism. Now imagine we could also dictate and control these thought processes and intentions, so as to ensure they aren't aligned with any particular viewpoint or political agenda. Unfortunately, this i…

In addition to the completely unfounded and false claim that AI is unbiased, there's this: > This is the key to a trusted news company - complete transparency and the opportunity for anyone, anywhere to contribute. Why do I want anyone, anywhere? What does that have to do with news? I want to hear from the best, not from the entire range.

This is referring to how the open-sourced code provides the freedom for anyone to criticise or correct the way the site works through contribution.

Also, LLMs are biased, but through prompt engineering and other techniques, you can produce neutrally-written text.

I realise now that my messaging with this project is off. What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news.

In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the positive/negative language and putting as much focus on facts as possible.

Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.

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

#163

Post by kej »

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…

Your comment reminded me of this quote from Howard Zinn (who had his own biases, of course):

But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.

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

#164

Post by mfext »

I had family that worked at a news paper back before the boom of the internet, and something that most people nowadays don’t seem aware of is that even then, most news papers relied heavily on something called the Associated Press (AP). If you ever read a news paper and saw the symbols “(AP)”, this meant that the story was picked up from “the wire”. That wire was reference to telegraph technology from the 1800s, and it carried a plethora of stories submitted from associate news papers around the US. Given the distributed nature of “biases”, it is considered collectively to be “in the middle”.

Going deeper in terms of analysis, in the US, the PBS news hour is the highest quality.

Internationally, I read Reuters which seems similar to how the AP works, but I don’t have anything to compare it to.

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

#165

Post by wolverine876 »

newsnotfound wrote: post #162
wolverine876 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to the completely unfounded and false claim that AI is unbiased, there's this: > This is the key to a trusted news company - complete transparency and the opportunity for anyone, anywhere to contribute. Why do I want anyone, anywhere? What does that have to do with news? I want to hear from the best, not from the entire range.

This is referring to how the open-sourced code provides the freedom for anyone to criticise or correct the way the site works through contribution. Also, LLMs are biased, but through prompt engineering and other techniques, you can produce neutrally-written text. I realise now that my messaging with this project is off. What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensati…

> through prompt engineering and other techniques, you can produce neutrally-written text

Through thinking and editing, humans can (and often do) produce neutrally written text.

What does AI change? Also, who decides what's neutral? The AI's programmers and operators - humans. Who decides if your AI's output is neutral - you do. Why couldn't you do the same with a human writer?

> Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.

Nothing is 100% sensationalistic. Anyway, I can (and do) find endless non-sensationalistic news.

AI changes nothing; you are an editor (which is a good thing to be - I wish you well).

But the idea that AI is somehow more neutral than humans, or that humans aren't in control here, is very dangerous. That is my concern.

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

#166

Post by newsnotfound »

PLEASE READ:

I've read all comments and I realise that I'm presenting this project completely wrong.

It's theoretically impossible to be 100% unbiased, and I'm currently misleading people by stating this across the site.

However, it's not impossible, and quite easy, to be 'the most unbiased' news source.

I believe the project can and will have a net-positive impact, by reducing the effects of sensationalism in the news.

Even if NewsNotFound articles were only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.

This project has the potential to provide a platform for readers to digest the news in a 'less biased' way than anywhere else on the internet.

Whether people want this, or prefer to read from biased sources because it's more emotive and relatable, is another issue and I think will stay a matter of preference.

I will update all socials, whitepaper, etc. to reflect this and I apologise for my ignorance initially.

There are a few other fundamental issues that people have pointed out, which I will try to fix over time.

Thank you all for your feedback and insight.

If anyone would like to contribute to the project, here is the GitHub repo: https://github.com/joshwallerr/newsnotfound

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

#167

Post by wolverine876 »

newsnotfound wrote: post #166

PLEASE READ: I've read all comments and I realise that I'm presenting this project completely wrong. It's theoretically impossible to be 100% unbiased, and I'm currently misleading people by stating this across the site. However, it's not impossible, and quite easy, to be 'the most unbiased' news source. I believe the project can and will have a net-positive impact, by reducing the effects of sensationalism in the ne…

> However, it's not impossible, and quite easy, to be 'the most unbiased' news source.

It's great that you are committed to providing less biased news.

But AI is not less biased, and the first step is to realize that you are not magically less biased than all the other humans who produce news. Unless you see your own bias, you can't manage for it. In fact, I think a good number of journlists do that quite well.

So do you, implicitly: Where will NewsNotFound get the 'facts' that it publishes, other than the journalists who go out, gather it, and report it? You can't witness it and report it yourself, beyond a tiny fraction of events.

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

#168

Post by alephaleph »

pydry wrote: post #148
grumbel wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I used to think this but increasingly I think it's a fool's errand. Wikipedia might have been like that in the past but it's long been corrupted. E.g. see the Philip Cross affair. For a while on the Ukraine war I tried to find unbiased commentary and news but I think it was basically impossible. The best I could find after looking all over was stitching together stories from sources who were biased to one side but st…

FWIW I was unaware of the Philip Cross thing, but after digging into it it appears that Wikipedia's arbitration committee imposed an indefinite ban on him from editing any page regarding modern British politics [1] and that after he was found repeatedly violating it, that was upgraded to an indefinite block [2]. Not exculpatory, but at the very least evidence that Wikipedia is capable of taking issues of editor bias seriously and not sweeping it under the rug.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Philip_Cross#Blocked...

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

#169

Post by throw22423 »

remram wrote: post #129
rch wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legible News almost completely eliminates bias by providing short summaries of judiciously chosen stories.

> judiciously chosen Some people would call that bias.

Not only that, but it's already selecting which news pieces to highlight. There's bias in that as well.

It's impossible to have unbiased news unless you're an omnipresent God.

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

#170

Post by throw22423 »

wesleywt wrote: post #76

The only news you should be paying attention to is local news. But the internet has destroyed that. Now we just have hateful news.

>The only news you should be paying attention to is local news

It's time to completely obliterate this meme. Local news are not relevant. They never were, they never will be. Let's see what my local newspaper has to say for today:

- weather today (probably less acurate than other sources)

- local grandma is about to turn 103

- car crash in midtown (nobody was injured)

- motorcyclist crashed (minor injuries)

- the results of a soccer match nobody cares about

- some section of the park will be renewed

- mishmash of national news and international news (copy pasted)

Even if someone you care about has an accident, you'll find out before you check this. The only thing would be a site that keeps track of the city's history or something like that. That and ads for local businesses... and obituaries.

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