7 ms·

As someone who has worked in the media industry, I can tell you that the problem with unbiased news goes much deeper than simply presenting facts objectively. T

As someone who has worked in the media industry, I can tell you that the problem with unbiased news goes much deeper than simply presenting facts objectively. The very first step mentioned in your breakdown - scraping the latest headlines from publicly available news sites - is inherently biased, because it relies on a small selection of sources to determine what is considered newsworthy. But by whom? In reality, editors play a crucial role in shaping the news by deciding which events to cover and which to ignore, based on their own biases and interests. From my own experience, I can tell you that the most important news stories are often the ones that go unreported/underreported by most news sites. Unfortunately, there are also many insidious methods used to shape public opinion, such as distraction etc. But it all starts with the decisions made by editors about WHAT YOU, as a reader, should SEE and CARE about. So if we truly want to achieve unbiased news, we need to start by reevaluating the very definition of what is news.

numbsafari 3y ago
There is no such thing as unbiased news. Anyone claiming to be unbiased, rather than wearing their biases on their sleeves, is lying to you, or themselves, or they are just ignorant. Likely some combination of all three.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- paulddraper 3y ago
  Selection bias is insidious, and impossible to rid. By definition, news is things that are newsworthy. I.e. the most common things to tech receive coverage are the uncommon to things. If four people get shot over the weekend in Riverdale, not news. If four people get shot over the weekend in Beverly Hills, news. You don't even have to try to bias news for it be biased. (Now imagine if you try.)
  - numbsafari 3y ago
    Unless you live in Riverdale. Underreporting on violence in certain communities vs others is biased. Who determines what is uncommon vs common? Who decides the value of 4 people in Riverdale vs 4 people in Beverly Hills? Just going by “frequency of shootings” is a form of bias.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  "Unbiased" is like absolute zero. You never actually get there, but don't think there is no distinction between putting in an effort to make something decently cold, and hurling it into the sun.
  - andybak 3y ago
    It is not. We can get within a few fractions of a percent of absolute zero but we can't sensibly agree on what "unbiased" even looks like.
  - Loquebantur 3y ago
    Imagine, you had some tool affording you complete information about everything happening on earth, aided by some AI that only tells the truth about anything when asked. You would still have to pose the right questions or risk dying in ignorance. People's complaints here about bias is really about being manipulated successfully by parts of society working actively in their own, markedly different, interests. Those won't just go away. Aligning interests doesn't happen by providing facts.
    - newsnotfound 3y ago
      Very good point. I realise now that my messaging with this project is off. What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news. In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the excessive positive/negative language. Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
      - Loquebantur 3y ago
        If I understand correctly, you want to help people get an objective baseline of information about the world, they then can compare their individual bias against. Only thing is, I don't think most people care about that. Humans provide their sentiment about developments to further their individual interests. Other people want to be informed about those motivations. Taking that away makes news subjectively meaningless for most. There is a minority of truth-seekers who essentially individually engage in OSINT activity (if only by consuming more than one source). An AI "doing the thinking for them" isn't the right way though (trust is an issue, remember). You want to teach people, how to be an intelligence analyst and give them the tools to avoid the drudgery.
- joelegner 3y ago
  Isn’t the aspiration to be unbiased worthy already? The goal or call it “aspiration” to serve unbiased news is admirable to me, even while my rational mind knows the aspiration is an unattainable ideal. I will give them a try. Then I can judge their sincerity and performance relative to their aspiration. Edit: added “judge”
  - numbsafari 3y ago
    How can you judge the relative distance from a fiction? Who defines what is “unbiased”? What are their biases? You cannot measure something that exists in a fiction that resides independently in each person’s mind. Objective reality exists, but objective observers do not.
    - revelio 3y ago
      So you don't Believe In Science, friend? ;) Objective observation is really hard, but amenable to systems and rules that help get closer to this ideal. I'm convinced it's possible to do far better than existing news organisations do just through approaching it with an engineering mindset.
      - newsnotfound 3y ago
        That's something I've realised after reading these comments - that the goal of the project isn't to be 100% unbiased. To be even 90% unbiased is 90% better than a sensationalist source. I'm sure we can get very close to 100% as LLMs progress and if more talented people contribute to the project.
      - numbsafari 3y ago
        I do believe in science, I think perhaps you have a very biased, or at least limited, view of what “believing in science” means. There is no way to judge whether or not you are close to some objective view of “unbiased news”. So it is not a worthwhile pursuit. As others have noted, what is “newsworthy” is an entirely subjective prioritization of events and information. Are four deaths in Riverside news? Are four deaths in Palm Springs? Are both? Are neither? It depends on your subjective priorities, as a consumer, and no single news organization is ever going to achieve universal, subjective, but somehow unbiased news prioritization. Labeling anyone person or group’s prioritization of information as “truth” is a dubious endeavor. Dubious to the point of being laughable.
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  This is why I prefer to read openly bias sources. If you read sources bias in both directions, you at least know the truth is probably somewhere within that range. Granted that range can be quite large at times.
- newsnotfound 3y ago
  I realise now that my messaging with this project is off. What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news. In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the positive/negative language. Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
  - cudgy 3y ago
    I wonder if this is true in reality. Isn’t it possible and maybe even likely that a non-neutral party is providing the most accurate version of the story? For example, a person or reporter living in a war zone, experiencing the actual war is likely biased in some fashion, but their recollections of what is actually happening is quite accurate compared to a “neutral” journalist sitting in their comfortable office in New York City, referring to various anonymous sources and reports from multiple perspectives. Also, filtering out the positive and negative language might hide the bias of the article, making it seem more authoritative and believable. Many times when I read an article, and I see the journalist making conclusions with bombastic and unbalanced language, it is helpful information toward allowing me to detect bullshit and avoid that source.
anukin 3y ago
What are some of your thoughts on the subject? How can somebody achieve unbiased news without editorial supervision? Would a quorum solve the issue with editorial biases creeping into news?
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Let's start by categorizing the information: 1. Information that immediately affects me 2. Information that might affect me 3. Information that doesn't affect me but I still care to know 4. Information that won't affect me 5. Information that won't affect me and I don't care to know 6. Information I don't care to know even if it affects me Surely there must be a way to monetize information delivery. I would pay for an editorial-less stream of information that is relevant to me, and that isn't that I still want to know.
somethoughts 3y ago
I find the closest to an unbiased news source is Reuters. I removed all other news apps from my phone and only leave the Reuters news app installed. [1] I never read the news anymore. The combination of the uncurated deluge of articles about stuff I don't know anything about (and realize I am not going to ever really know anything about) and them not really poking my buttons with editorialized headlines makes me just ignore it and come here more often instead. Edit: I fathom its because the Reuters business model is fundamentally different - they are just trying to supply as many articles for use as raw base material factoids to all types of media organizations who can then add their own "secret sauce/value" by curating which articles their audience "sees" and handle the "interpretation" of the factoids (i.e. insert the editorial opinion with headlines, quips for their audiences will appreciate). That said - I do recall reading about some instances that Reuters is not perfect (article rushed to press and not entirely factually correct). [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reuters-news/id602660809 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reuters-news/id602660809
- nobrains 3y ago
  > I find the closest to an unbiased news source is Reuters. Maybe for American news it is unbiased across conservatives / liberals, however from a non-American point of view Reuters is very VERY much biased towards US / CIA (even though it is incorporated in England).
  - decide1000 3y ago
    What makes you say that it is very much biased?
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  Reuters isn't so much a source of news, it's a (top level) news aggregator. A source would be an experiencer telling their story about the events considered new, i.e. unexpected. News are updates of our collective model of the world. Human communication has the aspects of content, sentiment and style. People look at style first, as they take it as an indicator for the social standing of the speaker. Sentiment is a close second, as it tells you about the attitude that speaker has towards the reported events. Content lastly is just the events themselves as they (reportedly) happened. People find that content part hard to follow on its own, mostly because they usually don't really know the context anyway. Focusing on it as supposedly important "unbiased" "true" news is a gross misunderstanding. Like yourself, people generally have a very incomplete idea of the world they live in. Like you, they don't seem to take much interest in it, as they view it as "not relevant to their lives". That is an absurd statement to make, if one has no clue about that part of the world to begin with, like you observed.
markdown 3y ago
> editors play a crucial role in shaping the news by deciding which events to cover and which to ignore As seen recently when Fox buried the story of their defamation case.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
strogonoff 3y ago
I used to think that unbiased news is an intractable problem purely based on information theory: to have an unbiased picture of the world, you need to have all the facts, which is physically impossible; and any layer that simplifies those facts (be it a journalist or an LLM) will add bias (either by journalist, journalist’s employer, LLM’s training data or operator preferences, and so on). In short, when your selection of facts to report is already biased, there’s not much you can do. In even shorter, map is not the territory (and all you have is a map). However, I realized that’s not really true. I mean, of course you cannot have unbiased news, and reevaluating the definition of “news” is not going to help you. It’s just that there is actually a very good mechanism for combatting this—and it’s called “be aware of your bias and upfront about it”. There is any other way around it.
- echelon 3y ago
  Unbiased news algorithm: 1. Identify all clusters of power and opinion, eg. Republicans, Democrats, Chinese Communist Party, UK Labour Party, Green Party, etc. 2. Associate each cluster with news organizations that tightly align with their policies. 3. Evaluate stories - headlines in only one cluster (under reported elsewhere) represent a view. Headlines that have different takes, likewise, give you a spectrum of thought on an issue or topic. 4. Collect fine points and build a report. Bonus for providing contrasting opinions and associating them with the party/power responsible for that thinking. I want this tool. It'd be okay if it wasn't perfect. Just getting 80% of the way there would be incredibly valuable. I'd pay for it.
  - netsroht 3y ago
    When I started working on Zeitgaist [1] I immediately recognized that biased information is the main problem. I'm currently thinking about attaching additional information to the sources I present like ground [2] is doing with political spectrums. I really like your idea for the news algorithm. If you or someone elsw wants to build something like that on top of Zeitgaist with me, don't hesitate to contact me. [1] https://zeitgaist.ai https://zeitgaist.ai [2] https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/
  - mynameishere 3y ago
ObscureScience 3y ago
It won't solve the basic issue you bring up, but https://www.improvethenews.org/ https://www.improvethenews.org/ at least help to make us more aware of those biases.
- FireInsight 3y ago
  There's also https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/
newsnotfound 3y ago
Because the project is small right now (and makes no money), I've included a very limited list of sources for each category, however at scale we would have alot of options for getting past this. For example, one way in theory is to scrape all known publicly available news sites and create an article for every single detected story, but this would be very expensive. As someone with experience in the media, what steps would you take to find these under-reported stories? Maybe the steps can be replicated with AI to increase coverage?
stainablesteel 3y ago
> the most important news stories are often the ones that go unreported/underreported by most news sites twitter and reddit do a pretty good job publicizing it though
trinsic2 3y ago
I think the The idea of this is interesting but I agree with you, Using titles to correlate results that are fact based isn't a greatest way to find unbiased information. You would still need some kind of variable that was not so well known. echo chambers are created by repeating information in similar ways. Its been my experience that echo chambers usually are the least reliable.
kej 3y ago
Your comment reminded me of this quote from Howard Zinn (who had his own biases, of course): But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.

numbsafari 3y ago

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

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
paulddraper 3y ago
Selection bias is insidious, and impossible to rid. By definition, news is things that are newsworthy. I.e. the most common things to tech receive coverage are the uncommon to things. If four people get shot over the weekend in Riverdale, not news. If four people get shot over the weekend in Beverly Hills, news. You don't even have to try to bias news for it be biased. (Now imagine if you try.)
- numbsafari 3y ago
  Unless you live in Riverdale. Underreporting on violence in certain communities vs others is biased. Who determines what is uncommon vs common? Who decides the value of 4 people in Riverdale vs 4 people in Beverly Hills? Just going by “frequency of shootings” is a form of bias.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
"Unbiased" is like absolute zero. You never actually get there, but don't think there is no distinction between putting in an effort to make something decently cold, and hurling it into the sun.
- andybak 3y ago
  It is not. We can get within a few fractions of a percent of absolute zero but we can't sensibly agree on what "unbiased" even looks like.
- Loquebantur 3y ago
  Imagine, you had some tool affording you complete information about everything happening on earth, aided by some AI that only tells the truth about anything when asked. You would still have to pose the right questions or risk dying in ignorance. People's complaints here about bias is really about being manipulated successfully by parts of society working actively in their own, markedly different, interests. Those won't just go away. Aligning interests doesn't happen by providing facts.
  - newsnotfound 3y ago
    Very good point. I realise now that my messaging with this project is off. What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news. In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the excessive positive/negative language. Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
    - Loquebantur 3y ago
      If I understand correctly, you want to help people get an objective baseline of information about the world, they then can compare their individual bias against. Only thing is, I don't think most people care about that. Humans provide their sentiment about developments to further their individual interests. Other people want to be informed about those motivations. Taking that away makes news subjectively meaningless for most. There is a minority of truth-seekers who essentially individually engage in OSINT activity (if only by consuming more than one source). An AI "doing the thinking for them" isn't the right way though (trust is an issue, remember). You want to teach people, how to be an intelligence analyst and give them the tools to avoid the drudgery.
joelegner 3y ago
Isn’t the aspiration to be unbiased worthy already? The goal or call it “aspiration” to serve unbiased news is admirable to me, even while my rational mind knows the aspiration is an unattainable ideal. I will give them a try. Then I can judge their sincerity and performance relative to their aspiration. Edit: added “judge”
- numbsafari 3y ago
  How can you judge the relative distance from a fiction? Who defines what is “unbiased”? What are their biases? You cannot measure something that exists in a fiction that resides independently in each person’s mind. Objective reality exists, but objective observers do not.
  - revelio 3y ago
    So you don't Believe In Science, friend? ;) Objective observation is really hard, but amenable to systems and rules that help get closer to this ideal. I'm convinced it's possible to do far better than existing news organisations do just through approaching it with an engineering mindset.
    - newsnotfound 3y ago
      That's something I've realised after reading these comments - that the goal of the project isn't to be 100% unbiased. To be even 90% unbiased is 90% better than a sensationalist source. I'm sure we can get very close to 100% as LLMs progress and if more talented people contribute to the project.
    - numbsafari 3y ago
      I do believe in science, I think perhaps you have a very biased, or at least limited, view of what “believing in science” means. There is no way to judge whether or not you are close to some objective view of “unbiased news”. So it is not a worthwhile pursuit. As others have noted, what is “newsworthy” is an entirely subjective prioritization of events and information. Are four deaths in Riverside news? Are four deaths in Palm Springs? Are both? Are neither? It depends on your subjective priorities, as a consumer, and no single news organization is ever going to achieve universal, subjective, but somehow unbiased news prioritization. Labeling anyone person or group’s prioritization of information as “truth” is a dubious endeavor. Dubious to the point of being laughable.
RobotToaster 3y ago
This is why I prefer to read openly bias sources. If you read sources bias in both directions, you at least know the truth is probably somewhere within that range. Granted that range can be quite large at times.
newsnotfound 3y ago
I realise now that my messaging with this project is off. What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news. In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the positive/negative language. Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.
- cudgy 3y ago
  I wonder if this is true in reality. Isn’t it possible and maybe even likely that a non-neutral party is providing the most accurate version of the story? For example, a person or reporter living in a war zone, experiencing the actual war is likely biased in some fashion, but their recollections of what is actually happening is quite accurate compared to a “neutral” journalist sitting in their comfortable office in New York City, referring to various anonymous sources and reports from multiple perspectives. Also, filtering out the positive and negative language might hide the bias of the article, making it seem more authoritative and believable. Many times when I read an article, and I see the journalist making conclusions with bombastic and unbalanced language, it is helpful information toward allowing me to detect bullshit and avoid that source.

anukin 3y ago

What are some of your thoughts on the subject? How can somebody achieve unbiased news without editorial supervision? Would a quorum solve the issue with editorial biases creeping into news?

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Let's start by categorizing the information: 1. Information that immediately affects me 2. Information that might affect me 3. Information that doesn't affect me but I still care to know 4. Information that won't affect me 5. Information that won't affect me and I don't care to know 6. Information I don't care to know even if it affects me Surely there must be a way to monetize information delivery. I would pay for an editorial-less stream of information that is relevant to me, and that isn't that I still want to know.

somethoughts 3y ago

I find the closest to an unbiased news source is Reuters. I removed all other news apps from my phone and only leave the Reuters news app installed. [1] I never read the news anymore. The combination of the uncurated deluge of articles about stuff I don't know anything about (and realize I am not going to ever really know anything about) and them not really poking my buttons with editorialized headlines makes me just ignore it and come here more often instead. Edit: I fathom its because the Reuters business model is fundamentally different - they are just trying to supply as many articles for use as raw base material factoids to all types of media organizations who can then add their own "secret sauce/value" by curating which articles their audience "sees" and handle the "interpretation" of the factoids (i.e. insert the editorial opinion with headlines, quips for their audiences will appreciate). That said - I do recall reading about some instances that Reuters is not perfect (article rushed to press and not entirely factually correct). [1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reuters-news/id602660809 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reuters-news/id602660809

nobrains 3y ago
> I find the closest to an unbiased news source is Reuters. Maybe for American news it is unbiased across conservatives / liberals, however from a non-American point of view Reuters is very VERY much biased towards US / CIA (even though it is incorporated in England).
- decide1000 3y ago
  What makes you say that it is very much biased?
Loquebantur 3y ago
Reuters isn't so much a source of news, it's a (top level) news aggregator. A source would be an experiencer telling their story about the events considered new, i.e. unexpected. News are updates of our collective model of the world. Human communication has the aspects of content, sentiment and style. People look at style first, as they take it as an indicator for the social standing of the speaker. Sentiment is a close second, as it tells you about the attitude that speaker has towards the reported events. Content lastly is just the events themselves as they (reportedly) happened. People find that content part hard to follow on its own, mostly because they usually don't really know the context anyway. Focusing on it as supposedly important "unbiased" "true" news is a gross misunderstanding. Like yourself, people generally have a very incomplete idea of the world they live in. Like you, they don't seem to take much interest in it, as they view it as "not relevant to their lives". That is an absurd statement to make, if one has no clue about that part of the world to begin with, like you observed.

markdown 3y ago

> editors play a crucial role in shaping the news by deciding which events to cover and which to ignore As seen recently when Fox buried the story of their defamation case.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

strogonoff 3y ago

I used to think that unbiased news is an intractable problem purely based on information theory: to have an unbiased picture of the world, you need to have all the facts, which is physically impossible; and any layer that simplifies those facts (be it a journalist or an LLM) will add bias (either by journalist, journalist’s employer, LLM’s training data or operator preferences, and so on). In short, when your selection of facts to report is already biased, there’s not much you can do. In even shorter, map is not the territory (and all you have is a map). However, I realized that’s not really true. I mean, of course you cannot have unbiased news, and reevaluating the definition of “news” is not going to help you. It’s just that there is actually a very good mechanism for combatting this—and it’s called “be aware of your bias and upfront about it”. There is any other way around it.

echelon 3y ago
Unbiased news algorithm: 1. Identify all clusters of power and opinion, eg. Republicans, Democrats, Chinese Communist Party, UK Labour Party, Green Party, etc. 2. Associate each cluster with news organizations that tightly align with their policies. 3. Evaluate stories - headlines in only one cluster (under reported elsewhere) represent a view. Headlines that have different takes, likewise, give you a spectrum of thought on an issue or topic. 4. Collect fine points and build a report. Bonus for providing contrasting opinions and associating them with the party/power responsible for that thinking. I want this tool. It'd be okay if it wasn't perfect. Just getting 80% of the way there would be incredibly valuable. I'd pay for it.
- netsroht 3y ago
  When I started working on Zeitgaist [1] I immediately recognized that biased information is the main problem. I'm currently thinking about attaching additional information to the sources I present like ground [2] is doing with political spectrums. I really like your idea for the news algorithm. If you or someone elsw wants to build something like that on top of Zeitgaist with me, don't hesitate to contact me. [1] https://zeitgaist.ai https://zeitgaist.ai [2] https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/
- mynameishere 3y ago

ObscureScience 3y ago

It won't solve the basic issue you bring up, but https://www.improvethenews.org/ https://www.improvethenews.org/ at least help to make us more aware of those biases.

FireInsight 3y ago
There's also https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/

newsnotfound 3y ago

Because the project is small right now (and makes no money), I've included a very limited list of sources for each category, however at scale we would have alot of options for getting past this. For example, one way in theory is to scrape all known publicly available news sites and create an article for every single detected story, but this would be very expensive. As someone with experience in the media, what steps would you take to find these under-reported stories? Maybe the steps can be replicated with AI to increase coverage?

stainablesteel 3y ago

> the most important news stories are often the ones that go unreported/underreported by most news sites twitter and reddit do a pretty good job publicizing it though

trinsic2 3y ago

I think the The idea of this is interesting but I agree with you, Using titles to correlate results that are fact based isn't a greatest way to find unbiased information. You would still need some kind of variable that was not so well known. echo chambers are created by repeating information in similar ways. Its been my experience that echo chambers usually are the least reliable.

kej 3y ago

Your comment reminded me of this quote from Howard Zinn (who had his own biases, of course): But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.