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For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources for any story and displays them

For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources for any story and displays them altogether on one page. My approach has been, if we can't get neutral/objective coverage, getting comprehensive, 360 desgree coverage is a good alternative. These days, news bias is not only in the way a story is covered, but also which stories are covered. So, maagnit automatically collects stories from the left and right.

jsilence 6y ago
That is a brilliant idea!
heisenzombie 6y ago
I’m sure this is not an original comment, but it’s interesting to see what you’ve classified as left/right. It must be difficult given that there is not really one axis of left/right and that “the centre” is highly relative. To me, seeing the BBC and Euronews in the “left” section is pretty funny, but I guess it’s true relative to US politics. Is there anything you’ve learned about “the left media” and “the right media” from doing this? Do you think your sources are equidistant from “the centre”?
- scrollaway 6y ago
  The fact US politics call them "left" and "right" is meaningless even, given how right-shifted US politics are (By EU standards, only US extreme-progressives are actually in the european "Left"). Not to mention americans have demonized "the center" as some "if you're somehow trying to consider all the facts you're a coward who can't decide" type of thing. The two sides being "at war" drives TV/website engagement and that's all that matters to the people writing the headlines. It just so happens that currently, one of the two "sides" relies heavily on disinformation; so anything that tries to fight disinformation (including remaining impartial) is that side's enemy. So those things end up being considered "left-wing". Truly, the united states has four political parties: The Media Left, the Media Right, the Political Left, and the Political Right. Nearly every american you know is part of the first two; the last two don't make for good TV.
  - cbnotfromthere 6y ago
    "how right-shifted US politics are As an EU citizen myself, I actually believe it is the Western EU which is left-shifted. "By EU standards" Perhaps you mean Western EU standards; I'm sure the majority of Polish / Hungarians / Romanians / Baltics will be shocked of your ideas. "only US extreme-progressives are actually in the european "Left"" The US extreme-progressives would be spat on as disgusting Commies in Eastern EU, where the left-wing Democrats would be the equivalent of Social-Dmeocrats.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  You are describing the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window - and in the US it is very narrow and entirely shifted into the authoritarian right side.
artembugara 6y ago
I like it. I would like to know how you did it!
doublesCs 6y ago
Seems like a terrible idea to me. The two sides are at war, and if the way you sample them is by going 50-50, that encourages them to be more extreme because that will skew the average in their direction. We already see this in the media. You have the host and two people. Lets hear what person A says, lets hear what person B says. Who's right? Impossible to tell, otherwise you must be biased. And no mention that person A drew conclusions on claims which were mostly verifiable facts, whereas person B drew conclusions on entirely made up claims. In fact, this is a known fallacy and has a name: argument to moderation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation Some times person A is 100% right and person B is 0% right. The thing is that to be able to tell the different takes effort in educating yourself. And the minute you try to outsource this to someone else, they will use that trust against you. But calling it 50-50 is not a solution, it's not even an approximate solution.
- trabant00 6y ago
  And the better alternative is...? What you say is correct but also worthless unless you provide a better way to do it.
  - p2detar 6y ago
    Definitely not worthless. Also OP makes a good point at the end: > The thing is that to be able to tell the different takes effort in educating yourself.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > And the better alternative is...? Actively researching both sources and stories, and not being a passive consumer who expects someone else to spoon-feed you a solution.
    - eloisius 6y ago
      You have the time to dredge up sources and check their veracity every time you read an article? Often sources are private but verified by the journalist. This is why journalism exists and has a code of ethics. You can’t just look every claim up on Wikipedia.
sabertoothed 6y ago
The US really needs to change their political system so that it's no longer "the winner takes it all" politics where only two parties can effectively rival. This is so poisonous for everything. No nuances in the discussion. Truth comes under the wheels. Stupid slogans win. No chance for larger green/ecological movements besides the overwhelming topic of economics. Ridiculous gerrymandering. It's just very sad to see.
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  So something like the super-dysfunctional political systems of Israel or Belgium or Italy or South Africa? Fixing first past the post voting is not some magic cure-all.
  - mahalol 6y ago
    We use the MMP system in NZ and it seems to work quite well, though needs a bit of fine tuning as currently you need 5% to get into a coalition and that is slightly too high.
    - sabertoothed 6y ago
      Exactly.
    - freddie_mercury 6y ago
      Since New Zealand passed MMP 30 years ago, every Prime Minister has come from the same two parties that have dominated NZ politics since 1935. Two party systems also are built on coalitions. It isn't as if "Democrat" or "Labor" is a unified ideology. I'm all for MMP but I don't think it will fix any problems in American politics. Just introducing MMP would add another veto point in an American political system that already struggles to actually accomplish anything.
      - dd36 6y ago
        *Accomplish anything good.
sdan 6y ago
That’s great. Nothing is never neutral so it’s best to show different sides of issues to make readers figure it out themselves (as easily as possible, but not as opinionated as popular news outlets)
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  There are a bunch of fallacies on the work here. There aren't usually 2 sides to a debate. The number of sides varies wildly and some times is even 1. All sides on a debate are not equal. There are perfectly fine reasons to honestly disagree about issues, but there are plenty of dishonest ones, and there is way too much dishonest coverage of things on the news; there are plenty of uninformed people with opinions that don't hold any water; and there are plenty of people just not interested on truth. Always putting 2 sides on equal footing in a debate is dishonest. It's made to have the appearance of a honest debate, while suffering from the same problems of a single sided view.
swah 6y ago
Cool - always thought of building exactly that. Do you just have a list of left/right sources, or some kind of "AI" to classify each item?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
The thing about which stories to cover isn’t only about Left/Right. It’s mainly about what draws most attention. I find most media biased towards conflict in that regard. The primary goal is to trigger emotions like rage and fear. So for my self I find I’m happier not consuming “news” at all.
demirev 6y ago
a piece of feedback: please move the 'close' button on the pop-up video player to the top-right, where users usually expect it to be (ideally I would prefer no pop-up player at all, but I guess you had your reasons).
- oceanbreeze83 6y ago
  This is a really good suggestion. I will mak this change this weekend, thank you!
eloisius 6y ago
Looks like it’s getting hugged to death now, but I’ve been looking for an alternative to Google News for a while now. I want an aggregator that doesn’t “learn my preferences” and tries to collect balanced coverage. Thanks for building this and I can’t wait to check it out.
SoylentOrange 6y ago
When I was a kid CNN used to do this: they would invite a single climate scientist and a single climate change skeptic and have them make their points on equal time. CNN would then say “who’s right? You decide.” And the program would end. This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. Given the lessons learned, I wouldn’t be so quick to replicate that experience with a website.
- nojito 6y ago
  The current status quo on the internet is infinitely worse than that though. The internet and social media allow you to ignore the correct conclusion because it makes a person uncomfortable with the idea that they could be wrong when everything they read reinforces that incorrect conclusion.
  - PaulHoule 6y ago
    Hard to say. By far the worst actor I've seen is (old media) Rush Limbaugh. It's hard to believe that Rush could believe that America faces any threats (e.g. war, crime, economic, environmental) other than the "Democrat party." You'd imagine that he wants to see a system more like Japan (liberalism with one party) or China (one party, no rights, no dissent.) More generally I see the problem of "spamming the agenda", combined with the "if it bleeds it leads" tendency of the media. Before Trump ran for president CNN's ratings were in the toilet, and it lumbered on between school shootings and MH370. To report on things like that you might have to take the Redeye from Atlanta to a flyover state, but today you can sit your ass in Atlanta or Washington DC and just cover 'what trump said', and 'what somebody said about what trump said'. Since the election, the news has seemed to be "broken" in the way that a "clock" breaks. Arstechnica's Dealmaster always has a sale on Amazon Fire devices, Anker power banks, Xbox Gold, and whatever craptop Lenovo has a surplus over. The banner on CNN often seems to go unchanged for weeks. (e.g. "TRUMP WANTED TO FIRE MULLER") COVID-19 was the first real news in a long term, but there is an obsession about "what trump said" compared to the other 300 million Americans. Trump doesn't really care if it is good or bad news, he just wants to be in the news, and if he held a press conference and nobody came, that would bring him to tears. Similarly there is always some article pushed by a right wing group that says there is too much occupational licensing in the U.S (maybe true, but the same editorial turns up every month as if it was fresh) or that there is a trade-off between economic efficiency and inequality. (e.g. the evidence is that if you have too much inequality people tilt the scales, rich people buy T-bills depressing interest rates, and try to keep the action for themselves and their children... One of those reasons why Stalin invented the Purge)
stronglikedan 6y ago
Since people here seem to be digging your site (well, those that can access it right now anyway), I'll mention https://www.allsides.com https://www.allsides.com as well. They also add a "center" viewpoint, which yours may do too, but it's getting hugged to hard for me to see right now.
- totemandtoken 6y ago
  I used allsides.com for my site too. I really like how transparent their process for assigning bias is especially compared to other sites that try to place news on a spectrum. They essentially try to assign a bias by having someone with each political bias assign a rating to the news and then collect how strong the crowd agrees or disagrees to that rating.
mguerville 6y ago
I have been a paying subscriber to Ground News for that reason, the app shows me bias very transparently. Glad to hear there are others doing this
pjc50 6y ago
The "wisdom of crowds" thing is supposed to work like those fairground games of guessing the number of sweets in the jar; everyone has their own answer, but you'd expect the answers to be roughly in a normal distribution around the true mean. Suppose you have a bunch of sincere answers of 1867, 1957, 2101, 2057 sweets, and then someone comes along with an answer of two million. They get a bunch of astroturf accounts, a few celebrity retweets, and suddenly thousands of people are claiming the answer to be two million, skewing the average up. They can even start using the fact that the other answers are different from each other and the average as evidence of their bias! It is extremely difficult to determine honest effort vs dishonest spin, but it's absolutely vital to the process because you have to exclude the spin guys and all their sockpuppets before you do any kind of averaging or consensus.
chanmad29 6y ago
Left, Right & Center podcast also tries to address this. They pick a topic and try to get both sides of the argument. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center
- mistermann 6y ago
  To me, picking a single topic and trying to get to the bottom of it seems like the approach that journalism should take (and advertises itself as taking, I'm quite sure), but the reality is anything but (in my opinion). I was excited when @oceanbreeze83 said: > For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources [for any story] and displays them altogether on one page. But unfortunately, I see nothing that does that on a per-topic basis. > Left, Right & Center podcast also tries to address this. They pick a topic and try to get both sides of the argument. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center It looks like these guys are actually taking a shot at it, but then if I pick a topic that I know is subject to extremely propagandized (framed) reporting, ObamaGate, something that I happen to know a fair amount of lower-level detail about (but for from everything, it is an insanely complicated topic), and read their overview: >> https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center/obamagate-wait-whats-obamagate https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center/obamagate-... >> President Trump is very upset about Obamagate. It seems to have to do with his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn — who the president fired after he lied to Vice President Pence and the FBI, and who pleaded guilty to charges that the Department of Justice is now seeking to drop. Is this a really important political issue? Or is this just President Trump’s effort to talk about anything besides the pandemic. ...I don't get a very strong feeling that what follows is going to be a sincere effort at truly "getting to the bottom of it", as much as is possible. But this is just an intuition, I'd have to listen to the whole 55 minute talk before forming a tentative conclusion. I find /r/NeutralPolitics to often be quite good on many topics, due to their very well thought out approach: >> What is Neutral Politics? >> Neutral Politics is a community dedicated to evenhanded, empirical discussion of political issues. It is a space to discuss policy and the tone of political debate. >> Is this a subreddit for people who are politically neutral? >> No - in fact we welcome and encourage any viewpoint to engage in discussion. The idea behind r/NeutralPolitics is to set up a neutral space where those of differing opinions can come together and rationally lay out their respective arguments. We are neutral in that no political opinion is favored here - only facts and logic. Your post or comment will be judged not by its perspective, but by its style, rationale, and informational content. >> Neutral Politics is strictly moderated. Our full guidelines are here: https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/wiki/guidelines https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/wiki/guidelines <--- Very much worth a read for those who are genuinely interested in learning more about how a "purely rational" society/organization should approach controversial topics. I would say that this is "how Journalism should be done". Unfortunately, they seem to have only one post on the ObamaGate topic. https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/gngtrw/what_specific_crimes_misdeeds_or_improprieties/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/gngtrw/wha... The submitter's question (see link for specifics) seems like an excellent way of approaching the question, in that he provides an example of how each side is framing/spinning the story, and then proceeds to ask a fairly awesome 5 part question on the matter. The post doesn't have much in the way of comments unfortunately - it's only 21 hours old, so maybe some will roll in eventually, but I suspect we'd have seen something by now. Regardless, the fact that someone recognizes the true problem and is trying to do something about it, and there are 295,123 subscribers to the subreddit, is quite encouraging. But I wouldn't get too excited about the notion that this grassroots effort subreddit will get enough traction and subsequent publicity to make any serious change in the world. For that, I think any initiative needs help from famous people who will repeatedly promote it via their social media channels. But my intuition tells me that most people are so unconsciously biased, that they would be reluctant to do this, as (I speculate) the mind will sense significant risk in promoting an unbiased platform, and therefore decide against it. I think this is the very same underlying subconscious phenomenon that @TulliusCicero and @dang are talking about in this post, but from a bit of a different perspective (italicized emphasis mine): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23227017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23227017 >>> (@dang) The underlying phenomenon, I think, is that people feel insecure in an internet forum, especially a large one, because the sheer quantity that shows up there is bewildering and our wiring did not evolve to process anything like that. Instead of seeing it as a statistical cloud produced by thousands of people (which is what it really is), we interpret it as the productions of a small group of individuals (which is how we're wired to see the world). Since that's such a distorted interpretation, those imaginary individuals seem weird and dramatic in our imagination. Either they seem super smart (because of all the information we had no idea of), which makes us feel dumb, or they seem monstrous (because of all the views that seem outrageously wrong or offensive), which makes us feel surrounded by enemies, if not demons—and so on. Because these feelings are uncomfortable, we end up creating an image of the community that we can diss in order to restore our sense of equilibrium towards it. The problem is that if everybody's doing this (and I think we all do it to some extent), it makes community really hard. >>> (@dang) There's a long sequence of past comments on a related mechanism here: (see link above for two searches he references). And also, while /r/NeutralPolitics have wrung about as much value as possible out of the generic Reddit reddit technical platform, I suspect doing this "right" is going to need a completely new platform, designed from the ground up specifically for this purpose. I assert that this is the most complicated problem mankind has ever had to address, it makes flight, putting a man on the moon, or splitting the atom look like a walk in the park. But if we ever hope to solve it, people will first have to realize the magnitude and complexity of the problem they are dealing with. If we ever want to get the current state of affairs on this planet sorted out, I think some truly(!) independent organization, and platform, that is completely controlled by "the people" is an absolute pre-requisite. But I am not terribly optimistic that we will ever get one, at all, or that gets enough traction to make a difference. Just taking many of the comments in this thread as an example, it seems clear to me that there is significant intuitive opposition to a purely fact-based, freedom of speech approach - by this I am referring to how so many people frame/conceptualize this approach as a ~"false equivalence", that it gives the two sides equal "respect", something that does have some truth to it, but the manner in which people describe that problem is typically by picking the most extreme strawman example they can conjure up (exposing their subconscious bias in the process, imho). Just a few examples (chosen at random, not the worst of the worst by any means): > When I was a kid CNN used to do this: they would invite a single climate scientist and a single climate change skeptic and have them make their points on equal time. CNN would then say “who’s right? You decide.” And the program would end. This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. > "Of course there are reasons why a gubernatorial election should not be decided by a ski race, but are there also reasons why it should? For the sake of fairness, we’ve brought in two experts with opposite opinions, who will now have equal time to just say those opinions, because that’s what news is." > For example does it make sense to present advocates for science and pseudo-science on the same level, with equal weight? Putting a Biologist who explains Evolution on the same pedestal on equal time as a Priest who believes in Intelligent Design creates a false sense of balance between these viewpoints, even though these viewpoints are fundamentally different in their very basic quality.
chrisweekly 6y ago
I like the phrase "transparency is the new objectivity". No human is truly objective, so being transparent and honest about biases, and making good-faith efforts to be fair-minded, is likely as good as it gets.
anaphor 6y ago
FYI, I'm not sure what the site is doing but it ended up using up a ton of memory and I had to kill firefox to unlock my desktop (FF 76, Arch Linux).
chris_f 6y ago
How are you deciding whether a source is right or left leaning? Is the rating a manual process based on some set of factors, or are you using an external rating source? IMO, Media Bias Fact Check [0] is on of the better external rating sources if you haven't come across them before. [0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
- oceanbreeze83 6y ago
  Thanks! Yes I use this a lot for determining if a source is Left or Right. Its great!
justinmiller 6y ago
Wow this is very similar to what I just started working on: https://bifocalnews.com https://bifocalnews.com My strategy for picking headlines is to let it happen democratically on Reddit where the bias is explicit in the community rules of the subreddit. I have not yet found a great "center" news source or community. I really like your news layout and the scrolling headlines at the bottom!
cloudwizard 6y ago
I think the biggest problem in US Society is the idea that there is just Left and Right. Often they are both idiots. The idea that our options for Covid are: 1) open up the economy and let people die until we get herd immunity 2) Keep every one home until we starve or get a vaccine. The correct answer may be complex like Taiwan's 124 point plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Taiwan

jsilence 6y ago

That is a brilliant idea!

heisenzombie 6y ago

I’m sure this is not an original comment, but it’s interesting to see what you’ve classified as left/right. It must be difficult given that there is not really one axis of left/right and that “the centre” is highly relative. To me, seeing the BBC and Euronews in the “left” section is pretty funny, but I guess it’s true relative to US politics. Is there anything you’ve learned about “the left media” and “the right media” from doing this? Do you think your sources are equidistant from “the centre”?

scrollaway 6y ago
The fact US politics call them "left" and "right" is meaningless even, given how right-shifted US politics are (By EU standards, only US extreme-progressives are actually in the european "Left"). Not to mention americans have demonized "the center" as some "if you're somehow trying to consider all the facts you're a coward who can't decide" type of thing. The two sides being "at war" drives TV/website engagement and that's all that matters to the people writing the headlines. It just so happens that currently, one of the two "sides" relies heavily on disinformation; so anything that tries to fight disinformation (including remaining impartial) is that side's enemy. So those things end up being considered "left-wing". Truly, the united states has four political parties: The Media Left, the Media Right, the Political Left, and the Political Right. Nearly every american you know is part of the first two; the last two don't make for good TV.
- cbnotfromthere 6y ago
  "how right-shifted US politics are As an EU citizen myself, I actually believe it is the Western EU which is left-shifted. "By EU standards" Perhaps you mean Western EU standards; I'm sure the majority of Polish / Hungarians / Romanians / Baltics will be shocked of your ideas. "only US extreme-progressives are actually in the european "Left"" The US extreme-progressives would be spat on as disgusting Commies in Eastern EU, where the left-wing Democrats would be the equivalent of Social-Dmeocrats.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
You are describing the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window - and in the US it is very narrow and entirely shifted into the authoritarian right side.

artembugara 6y ago

I like it. I would like to know how you did it!

doublesCs 6y ago

Seems like a terrible idea to me. The two sides are at war, and if the way you sample them is by going 50-50, that encourages them to be more extreme because that will skew the average in their direction. We already see this in the media. You have the host and two people. Lets hear what person A says, lets hear what person B says. Who's right? Impossible to tell, otherwise you must be biased. And no mention that person A drew conclusions on claims which were mostly verifiable facts, whereas person B drew conclusions on entirely made up claims. In fact, this is a known fallacy and has a name: argument to moderation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation Some times person A is 100% right and person B is 0% right. The thing is that to be able to tell the different takes effort in educating yourself. And the minute you try to outsource this to someone else, they will use that trust against you. But calling it 50-50 is not a solution, it's not even an approximate solution.

trabant00 6y ago
And the better alternative is...? What you say is correct but also worthless unless you provide a better way to do it.
- p2detar 6y ago
  Definitely not worthless. Also OP makes a good point at the end: > The thing is that to be able to tell the different takes effort in educating yourself.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > And the better alternative is...? Actively researching both sources and stories, and not being a passive consumer who expects someone else to spoon-feed you a solution.
  - eloisius 6y ago
    You have the time to dredge up sources and check their veracity every time you read an article? Often sources are private but verified by the journalist. This is why journalism exists and has a code of ethics. You can’t just look every claim up on Wikipedia.

sabertoothed 6y ago

The US really needs to change their political system so that it's no longer "the winner takes it all" politics where only two parties can effectively rival. This is so poisonous for everything. No nuances in the discussion. Truth comes under the wheels. Stupid slogans win. No chance for larger green/ecological movements besides the overwhelming topic of economics. Ridiculous gerrymandering. It's just very sad to see.

freddie_mercury 6y ago
So something like the super-dysfunctional political systems of Israel or Belgium or Italy or South Africa? Fixing first past the post voting is not some magic cure-all.
- mahalol 6y ago
  We use the MMP system in NZ and it seems to work quite well, though needs a bit of fine tuning as currently you need 5% to get into a coalition and that is slightly too high.
  - sabertoothed 6y ago
    Exactly.
  - freddie_mercury 6y ago
    Since New Zealand passed MMP 30 years ago, every Prime Minister has come from the same two parties that have dominated NZ politics since 1935. Two party systems also are built on coalitions. It isn't as if "Democrat" or "Labor" is a unified ideology. I'm all for MMP but I don't think it will fix any problems in American politics. Just introducing MMP would add another veto point in an American political system that already struggles to actually accomplish anything.
    - dd36 6y ago
      *Accomplish anything good.

sdan 6y ago

That’s great. Nothing is never neutral so it’s best to show different sides of issues to make readers figure it out themselves (as easily as possible, but not as opinionated as popular news outlets)

marcosdumay 6y ago
There are a bunch of fallacies on the work here. There aren't usually 2 sides to a debate. The number of sides varies wildly and some times is even 1. All sides on a debate are not equal. There are perfectly fine reasons to honestly disagree about issues, but there are plenty of dishonest ones, and there is way too much dishonest coverage of things on the news; there are plenty of uninformed people with opinions that don't hold any water; and there are plenty of people just not interested on truth. Always putting 2 sides on equal footing in a debate is dishonest. It's made to have the appearance of a honest debate, while suffering from the same problems of a single sided view.

swah 6y ago

Cool - always thought of building exactly that. Do you just have a list of left/right sources, or some kind of "AI" to classify each item?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

CuriousSkeptic 6y ago

The thing about which stories to cover isn’t only about Left/Right. It’s mainly about what draws most attention. I find most media biased towards conflict in that regard. The primary goal is to trigger emotions like rage and fear. So for my self I find I’m happier not consuming “news” at all.

demirev 6y ago

a piece of feedback: please move the 'close' button on the pop-up video player to the top-right, where users usually expect it to be (ideally I would prefer no pop-up player at all, but I guess you had your reasons).

oceanbreeze83 6y ago
This is a really good suggestion. I will mak this change this weekend, thank you!

eloisius 6y ago

Looks like it’s getting hugged to death now, but I’ve been looking for an alternative to Google News for a while now. I want an aggregator that doesn’t “learn my preferences” and tries to collect balanced coverage. Thanks for building this and I can’t wait to check it out.

SoylentOrange 6y ago

When I was a kid CNN used to do this: they would invite a single climate scientist and a single climate change skeptic and have them make their points on equal time. CNN would then say “who’s right? You decide.” And the program would end. This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. Given the lessons learned, I wouldn’t be so quick to replicate that experience with a website.

nojito 6y ago
The current status quo on the internet is infinitely worse than that though. The internet and social media allow you to ignore the correct conclusion because it makes a person uncomfortable with the idea that they could be wrong when everything they read reinforces that incorrect conclusion.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  Hard to say. By far the worst actor I've seen is (old media) Rush Limbaugh. It's hard to believe that Rush could believe that America faces any threats (e.g. war, crime, economic, environmental) other than the "Democrat party." You'd imagine that he wants to see a system more like Japan (liberalism with one party) or China (one party, no rights, no dissent.) More generally I see the problem of "spamming the agenda", combined with the "if it bleeds it leads" tendency of the media. Before Trump ran for president CNN's ratings were in the toilet, and it lumbered on between school shootings and MH370. To report on things like that you might have to take the Redeye from Atlanta to a flyover state, but today you can sit your ass in Atlanta or Washington DC and just cover 'what trump said', and 'what somebody said about what trump said'. Since the election, the news has seemed to be "broken" in the way that a "clock" breaks. Arstechnica's Dealmaster always has a sale on Amazon Fire devices, Anker power banks, Xbox Gold, and whatever craptop Lenovo has a surplus over. The banner on CNN often seems to go unchanged for weeks. (e.g. "TRUMP WANTED TO FIRE MULLER") COVID-19 was the first real news in a long term, but there is an obsession about "what trump said" compared to the other 300 million Americans. Trump doesn't really care if it is good or bad news, he just wants to be in the news, and if he held a press conference and nobody came, that would bring him to tears. Similarly there is always some article pushed by a right wing group that says there is too much occupational licensing in the U.S (maybe true, but the same editorial turns up every month as if it was fresh) or that there is a trade-off between economic efficiency and inequality. (e.g. the evidence is that if you have too much inequality people tilt the scales, rich people buy T-bills depressing interest rates, and try to keep the action for themselves and their children... One of those reasons why Stalin invented the Purge)

stronglikedan 6y ago

Since people here seem to be digging your site (well, those that can access it right now anyway), I'll mention https://www.allsides.com https://www.allsides.com as well. They also add a "center" viewpoint, which yours may do too, but it's getting hugged to hard for me to see right now.

totemandtoken 6y ago
I used allsides.com for my site too. I really like how transparent their process for assigning bias is especially compared to other sites that try to place news on a spectrum. They essentially try to assign a bias by having someone with each political bias assign a rating to the news and then collect how strong the crowd agrees or disagrees to that rating.

mguerville 6y ago

I have been a paying subscriber to Ground News for that reason, the app shows me bias very transparently. Glad to hear there are others doing this

pjc50 6y ago

The "wisdom of crowds" thing is supposed to work like those fairground games of guessing the number of sweets in the jar; everyone has their own answer, but you'd expect the answers to be roughly in a normal distribution around the true mean. Suppose you have a bunch of sincere answers of 1867, 1957, 2101, 2057 sweets, and then someone comes along with an answer of two million. They get a bunch of astroturf accounts, a few celebrity retweets, and suddenly thousands of people are claiming the answer to be two million, skewing the average up. They can even start using the fact that the other answers are different from each other and the average as evidence of their bias! It is extremely difficult to determine honest effort vs dishonest spin, but it's absolutely vital to the process because you have to exclude the spin guys and all their sockpuppets before you do any kind of averaging or consensus.

chanmad29 6y ago

Left, Right & Center podcast also tries to address this. They pick a topic and try to get both sides of the argument. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center

mistermann 6y ago
To me, picking a single topic and trying to get to the bottom of it seems like the approach that journalism should take (and advertises itself as taking, I'm quite sure), but the reality is anything but (in my opinion). I was excited when @oceanbreeze83 said: > For any news junkies heres, I've built https://maagnit.com https://maagnit.com which gathers both Left and Right leaning sources [for any story] and displays them altogether on one page. But unfortunately, I see nothing that does that on a per-topic basis. > Left, Right & Center podcast also tries to address this. They pick a topic and try to get both sides of the argument. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center It looks like these guys are actually taking a shot at it, but then if I pick a topic that I know is subject to extremely propagandized (framed) reporting, ObamaGate, something that I happen to know a fair amount of lower-level detail about (but for from everything, it is an insanely complicated topic), and read their overview: >> https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center/obamagate-wait-whats-obamagate https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/left-right-center/obamagate-... >> President Trump is very upset about Obamagate. It seems to have to do with his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn — who the president fired after he lied to Vice President Pence and the FBI, and who pleaded guilty to charges that the Department of Justice is now seeking to drop. Is this a really important political issue? Or is this just President Trump’s effort to talk about anything besides the pandemic. ...I don't get a very strong feeling that what follows is going to be a sincere effort at truly "getting to the bottom of it", as much as is possible. But this is just an intuition, I'd have to listen to the whole 55 minute talk before forming a tentative conclusion. I find /r/NeutralPolitics to often be quite good on many topics, due to their very well thought out approach: >> What is Neutral Politics? >> Neutral Politics is a community dedicated to evenhanded, empirical discussion of political issues. It is a space to discuss policy and the tone of political debate. >> Is this a subreddit for people who are politically neutral? >> No - in fact we welcome and encourage any viewpoint to engage in discussion. The idea behind r/NeutralPolitics is to set up a neutral space where those of differing opinions can come together and rationally lay out their respective arguments. We are neutral in that no political opinion is favored here - only facts and logic. Your post or comment will be judged not by its perspective, but by its style, rationale, and informational content. >> Neutral Politics is strictly moderated. Our full guidelines are here: https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/wiki/guidelines https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/wiki/guidelines <--- Very much worth a read for those who are genuinely interested in learning more about how a "purely rational" society/organization should approach controversial topics. I would say that this is "how Journalism should be done". Unfortunately, they seem to have only one post on the ObamaGate topic. https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/gngtrw/what_specific_crimes_misdeeds_or_improprieties/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NeutralPolitics/comments/gngtrw/wha... The submitter's question (see link for specifics) seems like an excellent way of approaching the question, in that he provides an example of how each side is framing/spinning the story, and then proceeds to ask a fairly awesome 5 part question on the matter. The post doesn't have much in the way of comments unfortunately - it's only 21 hours old, so maybe some will roll in eventually, but I suspect we'd have seen something by now. Regardless, the fact that someone recognizes the true problem and is trying to do something about it, and there are 295,123 subscribers to the subreddit, is quite encouraging. But I wouldn't get too excited about the notion that this grassroots effort subreddit will get enough traction and subsequent publicity to make any serious change in the world. For that, I think any initiative needs help from famous people who will repeatedly promote it via their social media channels. But my intuition tells me that most people are so unconsciously biased, that they would be reluctant to do this, as (I speculate) the mind will sense significant risk in promoting an unbiased platform, and therefore decide against it. I think this is the very same underlying subconscious phenomenon that @TulliusCicero and @dang are talking about in this post, but from a bit of a different perspective (italicized emphasis mine): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23227017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23227017 >>> (@dang) The underlying phenomenon, I think, is that people feel insecure in an internet forum, especially a large one, because the sheer quantity that shows up there is bewildering and our wiring did not evolve to process anything like that. Instead of seeing it as a statistical cloud produced by thousands of people (which is what it really is), we interpret it as the productions of a small group of individuals (which is how we're wired to see the world). Since that's such a distorted interpretation, those imaginary individuals seem weird and dramatic in our imagination. Either they seem super smart (because of all the information we had no idea of), which makes us feel dumb, or they seem monstrous (because of all the views that seem outrageously wrong or offensive), which makes us feel surrounded by enemies, if not demons—and so on. Because these feelings are uncomfortable, we end up creating an image of the community that we can diss in order to restore our sense of equilibrium towards it. The problem is that if everybody's doing this (and I think we all do it to some extent), it makes community really hard. >>> (@dang) There's a long sequence of past comments on a related mechanism here: (see link above for two searches he references). And also, while /r/NeutralPolitics have wrung about as much value as possible out of the generic Reddit reddit technical platform, I suspect doing this "right" is going to need a completely new platform, designed from the ground up specifically for this purpose. I assert that this is the most complicated problem mankind has ever had to address, it makes flight, putting a man on the moon, or splitting the atom look like a walk in the park. But if we ever hope to solve it, people will first have to realize the magnitude and complexity of the problem they are dealing with. If we ever want to get the current state of affairs on this planet sorted out, I think some truly(!) independent organization, and platform, that is completely controlled by "the people" is an absolute pre-requisite. But I am not terribly optimistic that we will ever get one, at all, or that gets enough traction to make a difference. Just taking many of the comments in this thread as an example, it seems clear to me that there is significant intuitive opposition to a purely fact-based, freedom of speech approach - by this I am referring to how so many people frame/conceptualize this approach as a ~"false equivalence", that it gives the two sides equal "respect", something that does have some truth to it, but the manner in which people describe that problem is typically by picking the most extreme strawman example they can conjure up (exposing their subconscious bias in the process, imho). Just a few examples (chosen at random, not the worst of the worst by any means): > When I was a kid CNN used to do this: they would invite a single climate scientist and a single climate change skeptic and have them make their points on equal time. CNN would then say “who’s right? You decide.” And the program would end. This was extremely harmful to the overall mission of informing people and created a false balance between sides which are not equally valid. Today, this is almost universally seen as a failure of journalism. > "Of course there are reasons why a gubernatorial election should not be decided by a ski race, but are there also reasons why it should? For the sake of fairness, we’ve brought in two experts with opposite opinions, who will now have equal time to just say those opinions, because that’s what news is." > For example does it make sense to present advocates for science and pseudo-science on the same level, with equal weight? Putting a Biologist who explains Evolution on the same pedestal on equal time as a Priest who believes in Intelligent Design creates a false sense of balance between these viewpoints, even though these viewpoints are fundamentally different in their very basic quality.

chrisweekly 6y ago

I like the phrase "transparency is the new objectivity". No human is truly objective, so being transparent and honest about biases, and making good-faith efforts to be fair-minded, is likely as good as it gets.

anaphor 6y ago

FYI, I'm not sure what the site is doing but it ended up using up a ton of memory and I had to kill firefox to unlock my desktop (FF 76, Arch Linux).

chris_f 6y ago

How are you deciding whether a source is right or left leaning? Is the rating a manual process based on some set of factors, or are you using an external rating source? IMO, Media Bias Fact Check [0] is on of the better external rating sources if you haven't come across them before. [0] https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

oceanbreeze83 6y ago
Thanks! Yes I use this a lot for determining if a source is Left or Right. Its great!

justinmiller 6y ago

Wow this is very similar to what I just started working on: https://bifocalnews.com https://bifocalnews.com My strategy for picking headlines is to let it happen democratically on Reddit where the bias is explicit in the community rules of the subreddit. I have not yet found a great "center" news source or community. I really like your news layout and the scrolling headlines at the bottom!

cloudwizard 6y ago

I think the biggest problem in US Society is the idea that there is just Left and Right. Often they are both idiots. The idea that our options for Covid are: 1) open up the economy and let people die until we get herd immunity 2) Keep every one home until we starve or get a vaccine. The correct answer may be complex like Taiwan's 124 point plan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Taiwan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Taiwan