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Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right

223 points by Hadjimina 5y ago

Hadjimina 5y ago
Hi 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 hot political topics and compare the most extreme political positions. It's super interesting to see how news from the left and news from the right report the same events differently. I thought about if I could somehow monetize the website, but I read somewhere (I think it was in the book "Range" by David Epstein) that it is probably impossible to do so. In the book, the author spoke about a study where researchers offered to give the participants a small cash amount if they read some articles that is in direct opposition to their beliefs. The participants declined. This means that even though I think "Their News" was a super interesting project to work on, I probably could not get people to use it even if I paid them to . Behind the scenes: It uses the media bias rankings from adfontesmedia as well as a news API by newscatcher (they were awesome and helped me a lot. Go check them out!). You are presented with a slider with a few dots. Each dot represents a news outlet (e.g. Reuters, Forbes etc). The news articles are shown below the slider always come from news outlets close to the slider. The entire project is 100% open-source (but contains a lot of spaghetti code ) on my github page (https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews). I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have. Cheers Philipp
- hnhg 5y ago
  It's been fun playing around with it, thanks for putting this together, it's nice work. 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. Also, I guess this analysis is taken from the perspective of the USA, given the chart on adfontesmedia. The definition of left and right (at least the Overton window) differs somewhat by country, and I feel that should be made clear on your site for global visitors. On the topic of differences, I spotted Al Jazeera on there and it made me recall that 'Al Jazeera Arabic vs Al Jazeera English' has now become somewhat of a meme, with the former being anything but progressive: https://twitter.com/search?q=al%20jazeera%20arabic%20vs%20al%20jazeera%20english&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=al%20jazeera%20arabic%20vs%20al... That again just makes me think of how news outlets change their reporting depending on the audience. I'm not sure if that changes anything for you though.
  - Hadjimina 5y ago
    I wanted to keep the website "clean" (whatever that means) that's why I did not specifically states that their.news is mainly built for US news. But I agree that this could have been made more clearer. Regarding the al jazeera thing: I was thinking about adding news with foreign languages and then using e.g. deepl.com to translate all the news on the fly and make it searchable. This would be really cool, but would require a pretty big restructuring of the project.
  - eganist 5y ago
    > 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-bias-and-reliability/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-guardian-bias-and-reliabil...) I haven't seen anyone say that it's "quite on the left" in any sphere other than the partisan right. Edit: Even OP's project seems to represent the modest left-skew accurately. Can you help me understand where your "dead-centre"-on-OP's-platform v. "quite on the left" interpretations came from? https://i.imgur.com/NTmQERS.png https://i.imgur.com/NTmQERS.png
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      Tory UK tends to characterize the Guardian as raving lefty lunatics, just as the right characterizes the NYT in the US.
      - nomdep 5y ago
        Not lunatics but very raving leftist for the last four years.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      People aren’t great at distinguishing comment and editorial from the news. It’s probably true that the Guardian’s news is centre-left, as you say. However their comment and editorial is usually pretty far left (Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, etc), and that’s what gets noticed and gives them this reputation. https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/ https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/
- wffurr 5y ago
  Reading “their” news makes me scared and angry that people actually read this crap on purpose and presumably agree with much of it. How is that supposed to help pop filter bubbles?
  - Hadjimina 5y ago
    Personally, I think it is valuable to understand that the thought process behind political views. I may not agree with anything they say but I may be able to understand their reasoning behind it, which is already a big step. Also as a mental exercise I sometimes read an article I 100% disagree with but then try to actually formualte in my mind WHY the article is wrong instead of just saying "AHH THE EVIL LEFT/RIGHT ARE AT IT AGAIN WITH THEIR LIES". It's not as easy as one might expect it to be.
  - gremlinsinc 5y ago
    I lean left but outside the Dem party I hangout /r/politics and lurk in /r/conservative and also checkout many socialist anarcho{communist|syndicalist|capitalist} and libertarian subs... I know what I feel is "right" and I feel confident I can tell B.S. I mean when the obvious goal is ...basically to make the op/commenter feel better about their "view" of the world then to me it's obviously something to take w/ a very small grain of salt, because real-world facts/figures/news isn't always pleasant it is what it is... Generally though I just like to get a "feel" for what others "think" so if I ever do start some non-profit or PAC or something (it's a goal eventually), then I can reach more people by being sympathetic to at least why they think they way they do. Sometimes I do chime in if I feel someone is clueless and maybe I could nudge them towards at least stretching their world view a little in a different direction. Something like this seems helpful, although as another commenter brought my attention to allsides.com which reminds me of alltop but for news, it seems a prettier implementation of this concept, would be nice though if there were story by story ratings... and people could declare their "views" and some ai scoring too...etc... TLDR: there's value in knowing how the "other side" thinks, feels, forms opinions - especially if you EVER hope to change those opinions. Ex-cultists are some of the best people to help others get out of said cult because they know what those people think and how the cognizant dissonance works.
- d0mine 5y ago
  Note: there may be other options how the same events are covered e.g., China, EU, Russia
- teapourer 5y ago
  Really nice idea and implementation. How did you determine each source's placement on the left/right spectrum?
  - Hadjimina 5y ago
    I used the rating from adfontesmedia (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/)
- Quanttek 5y ago
  Very cool website! However, I am not sure if ad fontes media is a good source of media bias ratings. Their methodology doesn't even name all the dimensions used to rate sources and their "training manual" provides very little useful guidance (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sources/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...). It doesn't seem like they are doing any inter-rater reliability testing. I don't find any peer-reviewed journal articles using the rating either. Maybe you could check out https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 instead.
- giantg2 5y ago
  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 somewhat more left skewed articles than right, but varried by subject).
  - Hadjimina 5y ago
    There is still a bug where you get news from all sites the first time you search for a topic. Just adjust the slider slightly and you should see the correct results. The bias definetly varies by topic, but I just simplified it so that all articles from one specific outlet have the same bias. Big oversimplification but should (roughly) work.
  - jefurii 5y ago
    > 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.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      Unless using machine learning to process based on more granular criteria.
  - imiric 5y ago
    Exactly. The biases are per news source and actually constant: https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews/blob/0c4c6a932abb1a91a0f66a4bfc23553ae1df25a7/src/helpers/constants.js 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 think machine learning would be suitable for this. Have something like GPT-3 process individual articles and produce a bias number. I think this is how https://www.improvethenews.org/ https://www.improvethenews.org/ works, and at a quick glance, does a much better job at classifying. 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. There are no bias sliders for social media posts, where most information comes from these days, and we need to teach critical thinking instead of picking what we want to agree with or not.
- xivzgrev 5y ago
  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
- orzig 5y ago
  You are probably right that monetizing is not feasible, but I’m principal I feel compelled to point out that almost no website monetize is the “average“ person, which is exactly the kind of person that a psychological study is trying to characterize. Think about it like this: I’m sure a psychological study where to find that The average person is completely uninterested in a text only website about technology so I’ve never heard of. Yet here we, and I bet a few hundred of us would pay a few dollars a month for HN if that was their business model
- sleepysysadmin 5y ago
  >I have the feeling that in the last few years all political discussions have become more extreme. No doubt true. The reason is the important problem. >Our filter bubbles don't help with this issue. Filter bubbles are a thing no doubt and certainly dont help but imagine your average person at the bar talking to his friends. They have a filter as established by tables IRL. Or imagine 100 years ago where someone had 1 newspaper to read and that was the most they knew about the world. >It's super interesting to see how news from the left and news from the right report the same events differently. I called this 15 years ago with google news. They kind of just aggregated the news and didnt put any slant or bias. You could see for yourself the lies made up by the journalists. >This means that even though I think "Their News" was a super interesting project to work on, I probably could not get people to use it even if I paid them to . I would say your implementation is nicer than https://www.improvethenews.org/ https://www.improvethenews.org/ from MIT but you're right. People are opposed to reading outside their bubble. If I may make a recommendation. Dont try to fix this problem the way you are doing it. https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-exists-1826271755 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-... Dont try to show the news but rather let people rate and search via authors. Do like Elon musk states and let people call journalists out on their bullshit. Have rankings on the site showing how rottentomatos the news is.
seestraw 5y ago
Great project, very interesting to see biases!
galfarragem 5y ago
You probably don't know this.. https://www.allsides.com https://www.allsides.com
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  I saw that website after I started their.news but when I tried to use it it was rather confusing to me. Also it seemd as if their focus was more on providing ratings to the specific articles than on quickly searching and comparing news. But you are of course right that both projects are very similar.
coalteddy 5y ago
Very cool! How are you scraping the news sites? Are you using an API?
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  Yes, I am using https://newscatcherapi.com/ https://newscatcherapi.com/. I was in close contact with them and they helped me out a lot. I think they are also opening up their api to more developers so make sure to check them out!
jefurii 5y ago
This reminds me of a 1980s magazine called World Press Review. WPR would take a number of topics every month. For each topic they would print a number of editorials from various points of view. Each editorial was accompanied by the source's masthead and a short note about the source's political perspective. For the most part they used the labels each source used to describe itself (conservative, libertarian, socialist, labor, etc) rather than words like "left" or "right". What I liked about WPR was that you got a sense that the world was more complex than a simple one-dimensional binary left/right, black/white, true/false. I believe that left/right language obscures this complexity. Worse, labels like "extreme left" and "leans right" and assert that there is a "center" or a default. "Centrism" or "moderate" is really just a cluster of political positions, though they may be the most common ones. The real world is not binary left/right. It's more like Princess Mononoke, with the wolves, the boars, the apes, the Imperial soldiers, the humans of Iron Town, the human raised by wolves, and the last Emishi prince. Update: WPR lives on as Worldpress.org but seems to now carry mostly original content rather than reprints.
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  Good point. Since I use adfontsmedia rating and wanted to have a very simple website I chose to reduce adfontes 2 axis to a single axis, which is, as you have pointed out heavily oversimplified. The default "center" position was chose simple because at this point there are the most news outlets.
  - jefurii 5y ago
    As a developer I can appreciate that you have to start somewhere, and even left/center/right does a real service in our political climate. I'm glad you chose a source that at least has two axes! Thanks for putting this project together - I'll be sharing it with friends!
- pessimizer 5y ago
  That might be a brand to look into purchasing for the OP.
- the_only_law 5y ago
Quanttek 5y ago
Not sure if you are affiliated with https://newscatcherapi.com/ https://newscatcherapi.com/ but I just wanted to note that the "privacy bot" is horrible from a UX standpoint and likely brakes the GDPR as well. 1) if you decline, it pops up separately on every website. 2) it doesn't allow users to separately opt-in and opt-out to tracking 3) the wording is not clear on the privacy aspect 4) it's linked to a chat nad newsletter
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  I sent them a prototype and they gave me more in-depth access to their api. No clue about their privacy things settings though.
baq 5y ago
left/right doesn't make much sense IMHO, it's way too polarizing in itself. you want at least two dimensions, like liberal/authoritarian policies and libertanian/socialist economics. that said i love the 'pick your bias' at the top. hits dead center on target. could even be the title of the service itself.
- valparaiso 5y ago
  When leftist media platforms like Facebook ban news about BLM marxist founder buying mansions in white area is this liberal or authoritarian/fascist approach?
  - baq 5y ago
    i don't know. do you?
  - gremlinsinc 5y ago
    It'd be libertarian, because libertarians believe that corporations should have the right to do basically whatever they want that doesn't physically infringe on another's own freedoms to do whatever they want. Facebook banning content on "their yard" does not hurt anyone because it's their property. Therefore on a spectrum this would be Right - Libertarian. Conservative on the political spectrum states: Right-wing political ideologies are characterized by conservative views. Since the political compass asks us to isolate the left/right binary for economic preferences, right-wing economic policy often favors reducing taxes, limiting government spending, and fewer government-imposed restrictions on businesses. Key: "fewer government-imposed restrictions on businesses" By controlling what Facebook can/can't ban that's imposing a restriction, so the opposite of that makes this right-wing since FB is being allowed to censor whatever they choose. Libertarian: People that hold a libertarian political identity often focus on the freedom of the individual. They believe that personal freedom should be maximized and they support the idea that government authority and control over their citizens should be displaced.5 Equality is of utmost importance for libertarians. ^ This, except lib/right consider companies/capitalism an extension of citizenship and give them more rights. The left would probably demand more fairness/equalness since the left-wing side of the political spectrum says: left-wing economic policy often favors higher taxes for wealthy individuals, stronger regulations for businesses, and government spending on social infrastructure. So authoritarian/left would demand higher taxes and stronger regulations possibly it would also give the government final say in everything posted on facebook and require facebook to divulge the identity and data of any member it requests data on, court order or not. As an aside I consider myself libertarian/left - as in I'd like less statist power (weaker federal govt, more freedom for individuals, but more oversight/regulations on businesses and corporations so they can't become countries unto themselves like Amazon and I believe egalitarianism is the most noble pursuit because we have enough resources and science to support everyone on earth - considering everything we waste daily, so why should anyone have to suffer if there's a way for them not to within our means if we just collectively desired that outcome?).
boomboomsubban 5y ago
At least on mobile, if you manually move the slider left or right, then make a new search, the slider doesn't reset position though the results go back to "center." Got pretty confused when it was selecting far left but showing Breitbart stories. Also, whatever fuzzing you use seems to break with the word "socialism," instead returning social media and socializing stories. Interesting project though.
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  oh shoot. Thanks for the input.
ptero 5y ago
This 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 fact that mainstream media on both sides seems to grow discord. However you select those articles, results may be the same :(. My 2c.
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  That is a valid consern. I get the rating info from adfontesmedia, so I do not judge the poltical views of each outlet and what is condisered to be left/center/right. There is no moderation what so ever (that can be a good or bad thing). But the website definelty still contains a few bugs so that might be the issue you are running into. Could you elaborate a bit on your second point. I am not quite sure I fully understand.
  - hellbanTHIS 5y ago
    Not sure about your sorting filter, refreshing the "center" sources is giving me some OAN, Epoch Times, New York Post, Breitbart, Daily Kos, Gateway Pundit - maybe "center" is a mix of everything? It should probably be just sources from the top center 1/3 of the chart at adfontesmedia
    - Hadjimina 5y ago
      That's a known bug
  - ptero 5y ago
    > Could you elaborate a bit on your second point. Looking at opposing views can help bridge the gap and encourage reasonable compromises. But in order to achieve this, the presentation need to be rational and (as much as possible) non-confrontational. Unfortunately, most current articles focus on enraging the supporters, not on informing the public. Showing such articles to either supporters or opponents is unlikely to help them understand each other. This is not a criticism of your side; but a criticism of most articles in the mainstream media. Look at old (30+ years ago) publications for comparison. We need to get back the similar quality of journalism; then showing people different views on the same topic can help us understand each other and reach some acceptable consensus. My 2c.
brokenkebab 5y ago
UI is confusing, IMO. Coming to the website I don't understand what I supposed to do. I clicked that bias line randomly, and most of the time headlines were from lefty sources. The idea is cool, but to be honest, it's hard to do it better then RealClearPolitics already does it.
d--b 5y ago
I hoped that this would put side by side articles about the same subjects but with different spins. I find myself comparing breitbart/foxnews/nytimes/guardian quite often.
- dguo 5y ago
  The Flip Side does this: https://www.theflipside.io/ https://www.theflipside.io/
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > The Flip Side does this Only if you give them your email address, apparently. What's that about?
    - lixtra 5y ago
      It’s a newsletter but you can look at their archive: https://www.theflipside.io/archives https://www.theflipside.io/archives
      - pdonis 5y ago
        Thanks for the link, I had not seen the archives.
- grahamjpark 5y ago
  You should check out https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/
vehemenz 5y ago
I 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.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  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.
- riskable 5y ago
  > "Left" and "right" news sources, as conventionally understood, would show a wildly asymmetrical data plot. Isn't that what's literally represented on the site though? The dots in the slider are not symmetrical. They're "wildly asymmetrical", as it were. As soon as I saw the slider with the dots my immediate thought was, "Wow, they don't have an extreme left dot! This could be legit!" Because--despite what common far right media tends to refer to as, "the far left"--there actually doesn't seem to be any "far left" news sources. I mean, where's the news websites that are constantly suggesting the people seize the means of production and nationalize all industries? Where's the TV news channel with endless talking heads referring to all private businesses as tyrannical for not spreading all profits across all employees? It would be interesting to have such a news site for comparison purposes because I think it would give every day folks a taste of what "far left" actually is (i.e. not CNN which is center-right yet ask any Fox News watcher what constitutes "far left" and they'll say CNN, New York Times, etc).
artembugara 5y ago
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): https://free-docs.newscatcherapi.com/#introduction https://free-docs.newscatcherapi.com/#introduction
kingsuper20 5y ago
This a pretty cool idea although the problem of defining 'right' and 'left' sources obviously rears it's head (who will watch the watchers). It made me re-remember an idea I had a while back. It would be an interesting exercise to take a New York Times news story and re-write to remove POV to the best of your ability. Perhaps add important details that they left out. Fer sure change the wording to remove loaded words and phrases. Get a couple of dozen friends to help out and you could do your own private newspaper. It doesn't deal with the problem of purposefully unreported stories or your own bias creeping in, but would be a fun thing to try.
- Varriount 5y ago
  Take a look at the methodology used by Ad Fontes Media (which this site uses as part of the "left vs right" scale). It's fairly scientifically rigorous, given an inherently subjective topic. My only critique would be that a larger team of analysts might be better. https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sources/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...
baby 5y ago
What scares me is that the “middle” view is pretty far right.
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  You might have also encountered a bug where in the center it only show news from "everywhere". Sorry for that.
- djanogo 5y ago
  May be you are too far left where "middle" seems like far right?
  - simtel20 5y ago
    Your ad-hominem attack of a response was written 2 hours after one of the site authors acknowledged a bug that could have caused the GPs confusion. Please do give your fellow readers and commenters more credit for their intelligence.
- bscphil 5y ago
  Yeah, try searching "white supremacy" on the default (middle) view. The top article is Breitbart whining about an article from Cosmopolitan of all places. I also see articles from OAN, Fox News, and Conservative Review... given that this was the search it (randomly) gave me when I opened the site, I don't have an awfully high estimation of its "middle" view.
pydry 5y ago
This would be useful for conflicts where there identifiable "sides" - e.g. war stories where both sides have media outlets.
austincheney 5y ago
Squad was an interesting search term in a disappointing way. The results are something related to soccer except for the far right. Searching Black Lives Matter produced mostly right leaning complaints, which I guess isn’t surprising. I was having trouble thinking of things to search that didn’t produce unbalanced results.
seniorivn 5y ago
interesting idea, but implementation is all sorts of weird, the scale of left and right is unclear, and more importantly changes from one search to another, instead of having vague terms like leaning left and right, you could put logos of different medias on that scale, and let your readers compare different articles to each other, so you would get some fresh data
mjfl 5y ago
I think the degree of left/right is influenced by the makers of the rating API and I don't like it. Notice how there are several sights near the "right" but very few beyond "skews left" (at least for the search term "Biden"). I would rather divide it evenly into 2 categories left / right and maybe add some further categories like establishment / non-establishment. Make categories that are invariant to political alignment. This continuous line is not.
- whymauri 5y ago
  Articially normalizing the spectrum seems even worse from an editorial perspective.
  - mjfl 5y ago
    No. It is disciplined. A good editor would know their subjective biases would disqualify them from knowing precisely where the middle is.
godmode2019 5y ago
Also this site - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news Shows different headlines for the same stories
narenkeshav 5y ago
This is a fantastic product.
southerntofu 5y ago
That's a pretty nice thing you did here, but i'm questioned by what you call "left". Left means abolition of private property (sharing of resources) so i was expecting more left-wing publications like (just to name a few) crimethinc.com unicornriot.ninja itsgoingdown.org theantimedia.com. Some like jacobinmag.com or democracynow.org appear on the project's README but i don't find anything from there on the site. Is there a place detailing the data sources for their.news if it's different than the adfontesmedia list? Also for people not aware that list itself was very sketchy in my view. From another comment of mine: > Sometimes i read articles from Jacobin Mag. I don’t follow it and don’t support it, however it pops up sometimes in my “feeds”. I was surprised to see it marked as really unreliable, while all articles i read there were long-form well-sourced articles. In particular, this article about US military courts is marked as highly unreliable, why? https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/us-armed-forces-capitol-hill-riot-military-courts-martial-ucmj https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/us-armed-forces-capitol-hill-...
- pvg 5y ago
  Left means abolition of private property It doesn't, that's just a misunderstanding of your own.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    What's your source for debunking my definition? What's your own definition? According to social sciences, and according to Wikipedia: > Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in critique of social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involves a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished.[1] According to emeritus professor of economics Barry Clark, left-wing supporters "claim that human development flourishes when individuals engage in cooperative, mutually respectful relations that can thrive only when excessive differences in status, power, and wealth are eliminated." > Leftist economic beliefs range from Keynesian economics and the welfare state through industrial democracy and the social market to the nationalization of the economy and central planning, to the anarcho-syndicalist advocacy of a council- and assembly-based self-managed anarchist communism. Social-liberal keynesian economics, according to that definition, is very-moderate left politics (center-left), whereas marxism or anarchism are more on the left. See also politicalcompass.org to get more information on this topic you obviously don't know about despite trying to lecture me. Also related, in the field of software engineering, we use the word "copyleft" precisely as in "abolition of private property" because copyright ensures monopoly on ideas and their expression (private property), whereas copyleft ensures they belong to everyone (collective property). As an end note, please note that abolishing private property doesn't mean taking away people's possessions/belongings. We anarchists refer to that as usage-based property (not sure about translation, we use "propriété d'usage" in french) where property is based on needs and not on the dogmatic worship of a piece of paper (property title). That is a central disagreement with the marxists who believe a central State and its police ("dictatorship of the proletariat") should be in charge of deciding what you can or can't use, which is effectively the same as private property with the State as owner/enforcer of everything.
ghastmaster 5y ago
Very nice job. It would be interesting to see all of the sources put into a Nolan Chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart
zackkrida 5y ago
I think this is great podcast episode on how political views aren’t really as newly polarized or extreme as people think: https://m.soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-112-how-polarization-discourse-flattens-power-dynamics-and-says-nothing https://m.soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-112-how-pol...
orhmeh09 5y ago
I recommend rethinking how you stem the input words —- I searched for “socialism” but all I get has to do with “social media.”
patinshuti 5y ago
this is so cool
coolgeek 5y ago
I agree with other comments about the questionable usefulness of left/right categorization. But even within this framework, I don't understand how this can be said to be working correctly. Right now, with biden as the search term, the top (default centrist) article is an opinion piece on Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-weak-poll-numbers-americans-unhappy-liz-peek https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-weak-poll-numbers-amer... The top "extreme left" article is from a fairly orthodox (albeit partisan) blogger on MSNBC https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/biggest-flaw-mcconnell-s-case-against-biden-agenda-n1264070 https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/biggest-flaw-mcconn... The Fox News piece is not in any way centrist, let alone objective. The MSNBC piece is not, in any way, extreme left. (To be clear, there is plenty of extreme left media out there. This is not a representative example. If you think - or if your algorithm thinks - that this is extreme left, you have no business being in this business.)
hopesthoughts 5y ago
What about the libertarian side of things? Or the center? Maybe the center doesn't have news sources though.

223 points by Hadjimina 5y ago

Hi 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 hot political topics and compare the most extreme political positions. It's super interesting to see how news from the left and news from the right report the same events differently. I thought about if I could somehow monetize the website, but I read somewhere (I think it was in the book "Range" by David Epstein) that it is probably impossible to do so. In the book, the author spoke about a study where researchers offered to give the participants a small cash amount if they read some articles that is in direct opposition to their beliefs. The participants declined. This means that even though I think "Their News" was a super interesting project to work on, I probably could not get people to use it even if I paid them to . Behind the scenes: It uses the media bias rankings from adfontesmedia as well as a news API by newscatcher (they were awesome and helped me a lot. Go check them out!). You are presented with a slider with a few dots. Each dot represents a news outlet (e.g. Reuters, Forbes etc). The news articles are shown below the slider always come from news outlets close to the slider. The entire project is 100% open-source (but contains a lot of spaghetti code ) on my github page (https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews). I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have. Cheers Philipp

hnhg 5y ago
It's been fun playing around with it, thanks for putting this together, it's nice work. 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. Also, I guess this analysis is taken from the perspective of the USA, given the chart on adfontesmedia. The definition of left and right (at least the Overton window) differs somewhat by country, and I feel that should be made clear on your site for global visitors. On the topic of differences, I spotted Al Jazeera on there and it made me recall that 'Al Jazeera Arabic vs Al Jazeera English' has now become somewhat of a meme, with the former being anything but progressive: https://twitter.com/search?q=al%20jazeera%20arabic%20vs%20al%20jazeera%20english&src=typed_query https://twitter.com/search?q=al%20jazeera%20arabic%20vs%20al... That again just makes me think of how news outlets change their reporting depending on the audience. I'm not sure if that changes anything for you though.
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  I wanted to keep the website "clean" (whatever that means) that's why I did not specifically states that their.news is mainly built for US news. But I agree that this could have been made more clearer. Regarding the al jazeera thing: I was thinking about adding news with foreign languages and then using e.g. deepl.com to translate all the news on the fly and make it searchable. This would be really cool, but would require a pretty big restructuring of the project.
- eganist 5y ago
  > 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-bias-and-reliability/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/the-guardian-bias-and-reliabil...) I haven't seen anyone say that it's "quite on the left" in any sphere other than the partisan right. Edit: Even OP's project seems to represent the modest left-skew accurately. Can you help me understand where your "dead-centre"-on-OP's-platform v. "quite on the left" interpretations came from? https://i.imgur.com/NTmQERS.png https://i.imgur.com/NTmQERS.png
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Tory UK tends to characterize the Guardian as raving lefty lunatics, just as the right characterizes the NYT in the US.
    - nomdep 5y ago
      Not lunatics but very raving leftist for the last four years.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    People aren’t great at distinguishing comment and editorial from the news. It’s probably true that the Guardian’s news is centre-left, as you say. However their comment and editorial is usually pretty far left (Seumas Milne, Owen Jones, etc), and that’s what gets noticed and gives them this reputation. https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/ https://somuchguardian.tumblr.com/
wffurr 5y ago
Reading “their” news makes me scared and angry that people actually read this crap on purpose and presumably agree with much of it. How is that supposed to help pop filter bubbles?
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  Personally, I think it is valuable to understand that the thought process behind political views. I may not agree with anything they say but I may be able to understand their reasoning behind it, which is already a big step. Also as a mental exercise I sometimes read an article I 100% disagree with but then try to actually formualte in my mind WHY the article is wrong instead of just saying "AHH THE EVIL LEFT/RIGHT ARE AT IT AGAIN WITH THEIR LIES". It's not as easy as one might expect it to be.
- gremlinsinc 5y ago
  I lean left but outside the Dem party I hangout /r/politics and lurk in /r/conservative and also checkout many socialist anarcho{communist|syndicalist|capitalist} and libertarian subs... I know what I feel is "right" and I feel confident I can tell B.S. I mean when the obvious goal is ...basically to make the op/commenter feel better about their "view" of the world then to me it's obviously something to take w/ a very small grain of salt, because real-world facts/figures/news isn't always pleasant it is what it is... Generally though I just like to get a "feel" for what others "think" so if I ever do start some non-profit or PAC or something (it's a goal eventually), then I can reach more people by being sympathetic to at least why they think they way they do. Sometimes I do chime in if I feel someone is clueless and maybe I could nudge them towards at least stretching their world view a little in a different direction. Something like this seems helpful, although as another commenter brought my attention to allsides.com which reminds me of alltop but for news, it seems a prettier implementation of this concept, would be nice though if there were story by story ratings... and people could declare their "views" and some ai scoring too...etc... TLDR: there's value in knowing how the "other side" thinks, feels, forms opinions - especially if you EVER hope to change those opinions. Ex-cultists are some of the best people to help others get out of said cult because they know what those people think and how the cognizant dissonance works.
d0mine 5y ago
Note: there may be other options how the same events are covered e.g., China, EU, Russia
teapourer 5y ago
Really nice idea and implementation. How did you determine each source's placement on the left/right spectrum?
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  I used the rating from adfontesmedia (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/)
Quanttek 5y ago
Very cool website! However, I am not sure if ad fontes media is a good source of media bias ratings. Their methodology doesn't even name all the dimensions used to rate sources and their "training manual" provides very little useful guidance (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sources/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...). It doesn't seem like they are doing any inter-rater reliability testing. I don't find any peer-reviewed journal articles using the rating either. Maybe you could check out https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=637508&p=4462444 instead.
giantg2 5y ago
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 somewhat more left skewed articles than right, but varried by subject).
- Hadjimina 5y ago
  There is still a bug where you get news from all sites the first time you search for a topic. Just adjust the slider slightly and you should see the correct results. The bias definetly varies by topic, but I just simplified it so that all articles from one specific outlet have the same bias. Big oversimplification but should (roughly) work.
- jefurii 5y ago
  > 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.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Unless using machine learning to process based on more granular criteria.
- imiric 5y ago
  Exactly. The biases are per news source and actually constant: https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews/blob/0c4c6a932abb1a91a0f66a4bfc23553ae1df25a7/src/helpers/constants.js 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 think machine learning would be suitable for this. Have something like GPT-3 process individual articles and produce a bias number. I think this is how https://www.improvethenews.org/ https://www.improvethenews.org/ works, and at a quick glance, does a much better job at classifying. 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. There are no bias sliders for social media posts, where most information comes from these days, and we need to teach critical thinking instead of picking what we want to agree with or not.
xivzgrev 5y ago
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
orzig 5y ago
You are probably right that monetizing is not feasible, but I’m principal I feel compelled to point out that almost no website monetize is the “average“ person, which is exactly the kind of person that a psychological study is trying to characterize. Think about it like this: I’m sure a psychological study where to find that The average person is completely uninterested in a text only website about technology so I’ve never heard of. Yet here we, and I bet a few hundred of us would pay a few dollars a month for HN if that was their business model
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
>I have the feeling that in the last few years all political discussions have become more extreme. No doubt true. The reason is the important problem. >Our filter bubbles don't help with this issue. Filter bubbles are a thing no doubt and certainly dont help but imagine your average person at the bar talking to his friends. They have a filter as established by tables IRL. Or imagine 100 years ago where someone had 1 newspaper to read and that was the most they knew about the world. >It's super interesting to see how news from the left and news from the right report the same events differently. I called this 15 years ago with google news. They kind of just aggregated the news and didnt put any slant or bias. You could see for yourself the lies made up by the journalists. >This means that even though I think "Their News" was a super interesting project to work on, I probably could not get people to use it even if I paid them to . I would say your implementation is nicer than https://www.improvethenews.org/ https://www.improvethenews.org/ from MIT but you're right. People are opposed to reading outside their bubble. If I may make a recommendation. Dont try to fix this problem the way you are doing it. https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-exists-1826271755 https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-pravda-media-company-already-... Dont try to show the news but rather let people rate and search via authors. Do like Elon musk states and let people call journalists out on their bullshit. Have rankings on the site showing how rottentomatos the news is.

seestraw 5y ago

Great project, very interesting to see biases!

galfarragem 5y ago

You probably don't know this.. https://www.allsides.com https://www.allsides.com

Hadjimina 5y ago
I saw that website after I started their.news but when I tried to use it it was rather confusing to me. Also it seemd as if their focus was more on providing ratings to the specific articles than on quickly searching and comparing news. But you are of course right that both projects are very similar.

coalteddy 5y ago

Very cool! How are you scraping the news sites? Are you using an API?

Hadjimina 5y ago
Yes, I am using https://newscatcherapi.com/ https://newscatcherapi.com/. I was in close contact with them and they helped me out a lot. I think they are also opening up their api to more developers so make sure to check them out!

jefurii 5y ago

This reminds me of a 1980s magazine called World Press Review. WPR would take a number of topics every month. For each topic they would print a number of editorials from various points of view. Each editorial was accompanied by the source's masthead and a short note about the source's political perspective. For the most part they used the labels each source used to describe itself (conservative, libertarian, socialist, labor, etc) rather than words like "left" or "right". What I liked about WPR was that you got a sense that the world was more complex than a simple one-dimensional binary left/right, black/white, true/false. I believe that left/right language obscures this complexity. Worse, labels like "extreme left" and "leans right" and assert that there is a "center" or a default. "Centrism" or "moderate" is really just a cluster of political positions, though they may be the most common ones. The real world is not binary left/right. It's more like Princess Mononoke, with the wolves, the boars, the apes, the Imperial soldiers, the humans of Iron Town, the human raised by wolves, and the last Emishi prince. Update: WPR lives on as Worldpress.org but seems to now carry mostly original content rather than reprints.

Hadjimina 5y ago
Good point. Since I use adfontsmedia rating and wanted to have a very simple website I chose to reduce adfontes 2 axis to a single axis, which is, as you have pointed out heavily oversimplified. The default "center" position was chose simple because at this point there are the most news outlets.
- jefurii 5y ago
  As a developer I can appreciate that you have to start somewhere, and even left/center/right does a real service in our political climate. I'm glad you chose a source that at least has two axes! Thanks for putting this project together - I'll be sharing it with friends!
pessimizer 5y ago
That might be a brand to look into purchasing for the OP.
the_only_law 5y ago

Quanttek 5y ago

Not sure if you are affiliated with https://newscatcherapi.com/ https://newscatcherapi.com/ but I just wanted to note that the "privacy bot" is horrible from a UX standpoint and likely brakes the GDPR as well. 1) if you decline, it pops up separately on every website. 2) it doesn't allow users to separately opt-in and opt-out to tracking 3) the wording is not clear on the privacy aspect 4) it's linked to a chat nad newsletter

Hadjimina 5y ago
I sent them a prototype and they gave me more in-depth access to their api. No clue about their privacy things settings though.

baq 5y ago

left/right doesn't make much sense IMHO, it's way too polarizing in itself. you want at least two dimensions, like liberal/authoritarian policies and libertanian/socialist economics. that said i love the 'pick your bias' at the top. hits dead center on target. could even be the title of the service itself.

valparaiso 5y ago
When leftist media platforms like Facebook ban news about BLM marxist founder buying mansions in white area is this liberal or authoritarian/fascist approach?
- baq 5y ago
  i don't know. do you?
- gremlinsinc 5y ago
  It'd be libertarian, because libertarians believe that corporations should have the right to do basically whatever they want that doesn't physically infringe on another's own freedoms to do whatever they want. Facebook banning content on "their yard" does not hurt anyone because it's their property. Therefore on a spectrum this would be Right - Libertarian. Conservative on the political spectrum states: Right-wing political ideologies are characterized by conservative views. Since the political compass asks us to isolate the left/right binary for economic preferences, right-wing economic policy often favors reducing taxes, limiting government spending, and fewer government-imposed restrictions on businesses. Key: "fewer government-imposed restrictions on businesses" By controlling what Facebook can/can't ban that's imposing a restriction, so the opposite of that makes this right-wing since FB is being allowed to censor whatever they choose. Libertarian: People that hold a libertarian political identity often focus on the freedom of the individual. They believe that personal freedom should be maximized and they support the idea that government authority and control over their citizens should be displaced.5 Equality is of utmost importance for libertarians. ^ This, except lib/right consider companies/capitalism an extension of citizenship and give them more rights. The left would probably demand more fairness/equalness since the left-wing side of the political spectrum says: left-wing economic policy often favors higher taxes for wealthy individuals, stronger regulations for businesses, and government spending on social infrastructure. So authoritarian/left would demand higher taxes and stronger regulations possibly it would also give the government final say in everything posted on facebook and require facebook to divulge the identity and data of any member it requests data on, court order or not. As an aside I consider myself libertarian/left - as in I'd like less statist power (weaker federal govt, more freedom for individuals, but more oversight/regulations on businesses and corporations so they can't become countries unto themselves like Amazon and I believe egalitarianism is the most noble pursuit because we have enough resources and science to support everyone on earth - considering everything we waste daily, so why should anyone have to suffer if there's a way for them not to within our means if we just collectively desired that outcome?).

boomboomsubban 5y ago

At least on mobile, if you manually move the slider left or right, then make a new search, the slider doesn't reset position though the results go back to "center." Got pretty confused when it was selecting far left but showing Breitbart stories. Also, whatever fuzzing you use seems to break with the word "socialism," instead returning social media and socializing stories. Interesting project though.

Hadjimina 5y ago
oh shoot. Thanks for the input.

ptero 5y ago

This 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 fact that mainstream media on both sides seems to grow discord. However you select those articles, results may be the same :(. My 2c.

Hadjimina 5y ago
That is a valid consern. I get the rating info from adfontesmedia, so I do not judge the poltical views of each outlet and what is condisered to be left/center/right. There is no moderation what so ever (that can be a good or bad thing). But the website definelty still contains a few bugs so that might be the issue you are running into. Could you elaborate a bit on your second point. I am not quite sure I fully understand.
- hellbanTHIS 5y ago
  Not sure about your sorting filter, refreshing the "center" sources is giving me some OAN, Epoch Times, New York Post, Breitbart, Daily Kos, Gateway Pundit - maybe "center" is a mix of everything? It should probably be just sources from the top center 1/3 of the chart at adfontesmedia
  - Hadjimina 5y ago
    That's a known bug
- ptero 5y ago
  > Could you elaborate a bit on your second point. Looking at opposing views can help bridge the gap and encourage reasonable compromises. But in order to achieve this, the presentation need to be rational and (as much as possible) non-confrontational. Unfortunately, most current articles focus on enraging the supporters, not on informing the public. Showing such articles to either supporters or opponents is unlikely to help them understand each other. This is not a criticism of your side; but a criticism of most articles in the mainstream media. Look at old (30+ years ago) publications for comparison. We need to get back the similar quality of journalism; then showing people different views on the same topic can help us understand each other and reach some acceptable consensus. My 2c.

brokenkebab 5y ago

UI is confusing, IMO. Coming to the website I don't understand what I supposed to do. I clicked that bias line randomly, and most of the time headlines were from lefty sources. The idea is cool, but to be honest, it's hard to do it better then RealClearPolitics already does it.

d--b 5y ago

I hoped that this would put side by side articles about the same subjects but with different spins. I find myself comparing breitbart/foxnews/nytimes/guardian quite often.

dguo 5y ago
The Flip Side does this: https://www.theflipside.io/ https://www.theflipside.io/
- pdonis 5y ago
  > The Flip Side does this Only if you give them your email address, apparently. What's that about?
  - lixtra 5y ago
    It’s a newsletter but you can look at their archive: https://www.theflipside.io/archives https://www.theflipside.io/archives
    - pdonis 5y ago
      Thanks for the link, I had not seen the archives.
grahamjpark 5y ago
You should check out https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/

vehemenz 5y ago

I 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.

A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
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.
riskable 5y ago
> "Left" and "right" news sources, as conventionally understood, would show a wildly asymmetrical data plot. Isn't that what's literally represented on the site though? The dots in the slider are not symmetrical. They're "wildly asymmetrical", as it were. As soon as I saw the slider with the dots my immediate thought was, "Wow, they don't have an extreme left dot! This could be legit!" Because--despite what common far right media tends to refer to as, "the far left"--there actually doesn't seem to be any "far left" news sources. I mean, where's the news websites that are constantly suggesting the people seize the means of production and nationalize all industries? Where's the TV news channel with endless talking heads referring to all private businesses as tyrannical for not spreading all profits across all employees? It would be interesting to have such a news site for comparison purposes because I think it would give every day folks a taste of what "far left" actually is (i.e. not CNN which is center-right yet ask any Fox News watcher what constitutes "far left" and they'll say CNN, New York Times, etc).

artembugara 5y ago

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): https://free-docs.newscatcherapi.com/#introduction https://free-docs.newscatcherapi.com/#introduction

kingsuper20 5y ago

This a pretty cool idea although the problem of defining 'right' and 'left' sources obviously rears it's head (who will watch the watchers). It made me re-remember an idea I had a while back. It would be an interesting exercise to take a New York Times news story and re-write to remove POV to the best of your ability. Perhaps add important details that they left out. Fer sure change the wording to remove loaded words and phrases. Get a couple of dozen friends to help out and you could do your own private newspaper. It doesn't deal with the problem of purposefully unreported stories or your own bias creeping in, but would be a fun thing to try.

Varriount 5y ago
Take a look at the methodology used by Ad Fontes Media (which this site uses as part of the "left vs right" scale). It's fairly scientifically rigorous, given an inherently subjective topic. My only critique would be that a larger team of analysts might be better. https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sources/ https://www.adfontesmedia.com/how-ad-fontes-ranks-news-sourc...

baby 5y ago

What scares me is that the “middle” view is pretty far right.

Hadjimina 5y ago
You might have also encountered a bug where in the center it only show news from "everywhere". Sorry for that.
djanogo 5y ago
May be you are too far left where "middle" seems like far right?
- simtel20 5y ago
  Your ad-hominem attack of a response was written 2 hours after one of the site authors acknowledged a bug that could have caused the GPs confusion. Please do give your fellow readers and commenters more credit for their intelligence.
bscphil 5y ago
Yeah, try searching "white supremacy" on the default (middle) view. The top article is Breitbart whining about an article from Cosmopolitan of all places. I also see articles from OAN, Fox News, and Conservative Review... given that this was the search it (randomly) gave me when I opened the site, I don't have an awfully high estimation of its "middle" view.

pydry 5y ago

This would be useful for conflicts where there identifiable "sides" - e.g. war stories where both sides have media outlets.

austincheney 5y ago

Squad was an interesting search term in a disappointing way. The results are something related to soccer except for the far right. Searching Black Lives Matter produced mostly right leaning complaints, which I guess isn’t surprising. I was having trouble thinking of things to search that didn’t produce unbalanced results.

seniorivn 5y ago

interesting idea, but implementation is all sorts of weird, the scale of left and right is unclear, and more importantly changes from one search to another, instead of having vague terms like leaning left and right, you could put logos of different medias on that scale, and let your readers compare different articles to each other, so you would get some fresh data

mjfl 5y ago

I think the degree of left/right is influenced by the makers of the rating API and I don't like it. Notice how there are several sights near the "right" but very few beyond "skews left" (at least for the search term "Biden"). I would rather divide it evenly into 2 categories left / right and maybe add some further categories like establishment / non-establishment. Make categories that are invariant to political alignment. This continuous line is not.

whymauri 5y ago
Articially normalizing the spectrum seems even worse from an editorial perspective.
- mjfl 5y ago
  No. It is disciplined. A good editor would know their subjective biases would disqualify them from knowing precisely where the middle is.

godmode2019 5y ago

Also this site - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news Shows different headlines for the same stories

narenkeshav 5y ago

This is a fantastic product.

southerntofu 5y ago

That's a pretty nice thing you did here, but i'm questioned by what you call "left". Left means abolition of private property (sharing of resources) so i was expecting more left-wing publications like (just to name a few) crimethinc.com unicornriot.ninja itsgoingdown.org theantimedia.com. Some like jacobinmag.com or democracynow.org appear on the project's README but i don't find anything from there on the site. Is there a place detailing the data sources for their.news if it's different than the adfontesmedia list? Also for people not aware that list itself was very sketchy in my view. From another comment of mine: > Sometimes i read articles from Jacobin Mag. I don’t follow it and don’t support it, however it pops up sometimes in my “feeds”. I was surprised to see it marked as really unreliable, while all articles i read there were long-form well-sourced articles. In particular, this article about US military courts is marked as highly unreliable, why? https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/us-armed-forces-capitol-hill-riot-military-courts-martial-ucmj https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/us-armed-forces-capitol-hill-...

pvg 5y ago
Left means abolition of private property It doesn't, that's just a misunderstanding of your own.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  What's your source for debunking my definition? What's your own definition? According to social sciences, and according to Wikipedia: > Left-wing politics supports social equality and egalitarianism, often in critique of social hierarchy. Left-wing politics typically involves a concern for those in society whom its adherents perceive as disadvantaged relative to others as well as a belief that there are unjustified inequalities that need to be reduced or abolished.[1] According to emeritus professor of economics Barry Clark, left-wing supporters "claim that human development flourishes when individuals engage in cooperative, mutually respectful relations that can thrive only when excessive differences in status, power, and wealth are eliminated." > Leftist economic beliefs range from Keynesian economics and the welfare state through industrial democracy and the social market to the nationalization of the economy and central planning, to the anarcho-syndicalist advocacy of a council- and assembly-based self-managed anarchist communism. Social-liberal keynesian economics, according to that definition, is very-moderate left politics (center-left), whereas marxism or anarchism are more on the left. See also politicalcompass.org to get more information on this topic you obviously don't know about despite trying to lecture me. Also related, in the field of software engineering, we use the word "copyleft" precisely as in "abolition of private property" because copyright ensures monopoly on ideas and their expression (private property), whereas copyleft ensures they belong to everyone (collective property). As an end note, please note that abolishing private property doesn't mean taking away people's possessions/belongings. We anarchists refer to that as usage-based property (not sure about translation, we use "propriété d'usage" in french) where property is based on needs and not on the dogmatic worship of a piece of paper (property title). That is a central disagreement with the marxists who believe a central State and its police ("dictatorship of the proletariat") should be in charge of deciding what you can or can't use, which is effectively the same as private property with the State as owner/enforcer of everything.

ghastmaster 5y ago

Very nice job. It would be interesting to see all of the sources put into a Nolan Chart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart

zackkrida 5y ago

I think this is great podcast episode on how political views aren’t really as newly polarized or extreme as people think: https://m.soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-112-how-polarization-discourse-flattens-power-dynamics-and-says-nothing https://m.soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/episode-112-how-pol...

orhmeh09 5y ago

I recommend rethinking how you stem the input words —- I searched for “socialism” but all I get has to do with “social media.”

patinshuti 5y ago

this is so cool

coolgeek 5y ago

I agree with other comments about the questionable usefulness of left/right categorization. But even within this framework, I don't understand how this can be said to be working correctly. Right now, with biden as the search term, the top (default centrist) article is an opinion piece on Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-weak-poll-numbers-americans-unhappy-liz-peek https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-weak-poll-numbers-amer... The top "extreme left" article is from a fairly orthodox (albeit partisan) blogger on MSNBC https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/biggest-flaw-mcconnell-s-case-against-biden-agenda-n1264070 https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/biggest-flaw-mcconn... The Fox News piece is not in any way centrist, let alone objective. The MSNBC piece is not, in any way, extreme left. (To be clear, there is plenty of extreme left media out there. This is not a representative example. If you think - or if your algorithm thinks - that this is extreme left, you have no business being in this business.)

hopesthoughts 5y ago

What about the libertarian side of things? Or the center? Maybe the center doesn't have news sources though.