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"Absence of bias" is a useless concept. A news outlet must make choices about which topics to cover; what facts to report about those topics; which sources to

"Absence of bias" is a useless concept. A news outlet must make choices about which topics to cover; what facts to report about those topics; which sources to trust, which to use skeptically, and which to ignore; which claims to treat as settled fact and which as disputed (and then it must decide how to contextualize disputed claims); and so on, ad infinitum. What would it mean to cover news without introducing an editorial viewpoint in this way? There is no such thing. If talk about "bias" is to mean anything, you need to be specific about concrete forms of bias you're trying to rule out, and how.

glenra 9y ago
Although the "how" part seems to be "via our proprietary process", they are pretty specific about what concrete forms of bias they're trying to rule out. They list that, with a few examples, here: https://www.theknifemedia.com/our-process/ https://www.theknifemedia.com/our-process/ The first stage ("the spin") is just identifying words and phrases which add spin with a positive or negative valance - this part could easily be automated with a dictionary search or by training a neural net. (There should probably be a Chrome plugin for it.) The other two steps are more tricky and would seem to require a human editor's eye. "the slant" involves noticing when one perspective is put in an article to the exclusion of other, similarly valid perspectives which have been left out - to do that you'd have to either be a subject matter expert or combine enough stories from different sources to identify the universe of possible takes. "the logic" involves noticing when conclusions don't follow from the facts presented; this also would appear to require somebody carefully reading and understanding the story. So my guess is that step 1 is fully-automated now (but being tweaked) and steps 2 and 3 need human editors with some algorithmic assistance (which they're trying to increase over time) - at least, that's how I'd have set it up...

glenra 9y ago

Although the "how" part seems to be "via our proprietary process", they are pretty specific about what concrete forms of bias they're trying to rule out. They list that, with a few examples, here: https://www.theknifemedia.com/our-process/ https://www.theknifemedia.com/our-process/ The first stage ("the spin") is just identifying words and phrases which add spin with a positive or negative valance - this part could easily be automated with a dictionary search or by training a neural net. (There should probably be a Chrome plugin for it.) The other two steps are more tricky and would seem to require a human editor's eye. "the slant" involves noticing when one perspective is put in an article to the exclusion of other, similarly valid perspectives which have been left out - to do that you'd have to either be a subject matter expert or combine enough stories from different sources to identify the universe of possible takes. "the logic" involves noticing when conclusions don't follow from the facts presented; this also would appear to require somebody carefully reading and understanding the story. So my guess is that step 1 is fully-automated now (but being tweaked) and steps 2 and 3 need human editors with some algorithmic assistance (which they're trying to increase over time) - at least, that's how I'd have set it up...