[HN Gopher] Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
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Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
Author : Hadjimina
Score : 178 points
Date : 2021-04-17 08:32 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (their.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (their.news)
| baby wrote:
| What scares me is that the "middle" view is pretty far right.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| You might have also encountered a bug where in the center it
| only show news from "everywhere". Sorry for that.
| baq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| When leftist media platforms like Facebook ban news about BLM
| marxist founder buying mansions in white area is this liberal
| or authoritarian/fascist approach?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It's definitely an authoritarian measure as it involves a
| central entity interfering between two third parties
| (Facebook blocks a newspaper from talking to you). It can
| also be seen as having a left bias because it seems to imply
| that owning money and buying mansions is inherently bad (why
| would they hide it, otherwise?) and therefore that rewarding
| people for their work (even when you don't agree with the
| nature of their work) is wrong.
|
| Liberalism is a tricky word, because Modern Liberalism or
| Social Liberalism (or just Liberalism in the USA) are almost
| the opposite of Classical Liberalism.
|
| The Political Compass avoids the terms and use:
|
| - Authoritarian (Fascism) - Libertarian (Anarchism): from
| "everything is controlled by a central entity" to "everything
| is decentralised" - Left (Communism) - Right (Neo-
| liberalism): from "everything is nationalised", to
| "everything is provided by the market"
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| 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?).
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That's an interesting interpretation and I like it, even if
| I disagree!
|
| There is nothing libertarian about censoring someone.
|
| Sure, you have the right to do that, given they're on your
| private property (on Facebook) but that screams
| authoritarianism: it's like Facebook is his own little
| country ruling on his citizens and limiting their freedom.
|
| Now, the act of advocating for Facebook to be able to do
| what it is currently able to do is libertarian. An
| authoritarian measure would be, as you mention, regulating
| Facebook to force them to publish anything or giving
| exactly the same space / visibility to people of opposing
| viewpoints.
|
| As an another aside, as an anarcho-capitalist (right
| libertarian), I've a lot of respect for your political
| viewpoint - that would be ideal but I think it's
| unachievable. Egalitarianism - or equality of outcomes -
| can't happen unless you force it with an authoritarian
| government or you have perfect people that share
| voluntarily everything. On top of this, as soon as you have
| an authoritarian government you'll start having corruption
| (we don't have perfect people) which will favour government
| officials over normal people, throwing in the bin your
| egalitarianism.
|
| Instead of focusing on equality of outcomes, I think we
| should focus on reaching equality of opportunity; given we
| have imperfect people we need a system of incentives to
| keep people broadly aligned with what society wants.
| Therefore there should be no government (which is outside
| the market and corruptible) and all services (including
| protection, healthcare, lawmaking) should be provided by
| the market. I think this will bring us as close to
| egalitarianism as we can possibly get.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| It's always the edge conditions that are the interesting
| ones.
|
| How does an anarcho-capitalist deal with issues like
| village commons, natural monopolies, winner-take-all
| business models, national borders, etc?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> How does an anarcho-capitalist deal with issues like
| village commons, natural monopolies, winner-take-all
| business models, national borders, etc?_
|
| The general answer is, by mutual agreement among the
| affected persons, and by refusing to interact at all with
| people who cannot be trusted to abide by mutual
| agreements.
|
| For a more detailed treatment, see, for example, David
| Friedman's _The Machinery of Freedom_.
|
| Of course there is no simple, short path from where we
| are now to any feasible anarcho-capitalist society; the
| idea that we need governments to solve problems is
| becoming more and more firmly entrenched, even in the
| face of the terrible track record of governments at
| actually solving problems.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> 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_
|
| No, libertarians believe that _actual people_ should have
| that right (subject to the non-aggression principle, which
| is actually more than just "doesn't physically infringe on
| another's freedoms"). Corporations are not actual people.
|
| To a libertarian, corporations are tools that individual
| people can use if they want to work together to accomplish
| some common purpose. But most "corporations" in today's
| society are no such thing; certainly Facebook is not. Most
| stockholders in corporations today have no actual interest
| in what the corporation does or what common purpose it is
| serving; they view their stock as just a money-making
| asset. (Indeed, most "stockholders" in individual
| corporations today are mutual funds, not individual
| investors.) None of this is libertarian; it is due to
| government manipulation of the financial system and
| government regulation of corporations and investments. In a
| truly libertarian world something like Facebook could not
| even exist.
| baq wrote:
| i don't know. do you?
| d--b wrote:
| 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.
| grahamjpark wrote:
| You should check out https://ground.news/
| dguo wrote:
| The Flip Side does this: https://www.theflipside.io/
| pdonis wrote:
| _> The Flip Side does this_
|
| Only if you give them your email address, apparently. What's
| that about?
| lixtra wrote:
| It's a newsletter but you can look at their archive:
|
| https://www.theflipside.io/archives
| vehemenz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > "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).
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| oh shoot. Thanks for the input.
| austincheney wrote:
| 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.
| narenkeshav wrote:
| This is a fantastic product.
| seestraw wrote:
| Great project, very interesting to see biases!
| seniorivn wrote:
| 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
| southerntofu wrote:
| 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-...
| pvg wrote:
| _Left means abolition of private property_
|
| It doesn't, that's just a misunderstanding of your own.
| galfarragem wrote:
| You probably don't know this.. https://www.allsides.com
| Hadjimina wrote:
| 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.
| mjfl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Articially normalizing the spectrum seems even worse from an
| editorial perspective.
| mjfl wrote:
| No. It is disciplined. A good editor would know their
| subjective biases would disqualify them from knowing
| precisely where the middle is.
| coalteddy wrote:
| Very cool! How are you scraping the news sites? Are you using an
| API?
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Yes, I am using 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!
| godmode2019 wrote:
| Also this site - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
|
| Shows different headlines for the same stories
| artembugara wrote:
| 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
| ptero wrote:
| 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.
| hawk_ wrote:
| well reality is famously known to have a 'liberal bias'
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Depends, I saw CA counties banning people from the beaches
| during the spread of an indoor airborne virus.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| You've really missed the point here.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's a known bug
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-sourc...
| ghastmaster wrote:
| 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
| brokenkebab wrote:
| 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.
| jefurii wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| the_only_law wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Not familiar with the reference, but I get the idea, and mostly
| agree. But particularly in places like the US where there are
| only two "real" parties it seems that most of the groups will
| ally with each other, even if otherwise vehemently opposed and
| form two vague alliances which you could perhaps classify as
| left or right if you so wished.
|
| This is even more frightening to me as I realize you can't
| trust anyone's words and see certain factions "courting" other
| ones (and perhaps in my view, very dangerous ones) in attempt
| to fight the other side while still trying to claim ideas
| incompatible with those they've allied with and help provide
| power to.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That might be a brand to look into purchasing for the OP.
| Quanttek wrote:
| Not sure if you are affiliated with 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 wrote:
| I sent them a prototype and they gave me more in-depth access
| to their api. No clue about their privacy things settings
| though.
| pydry wrote:
| This would be useful for conflicts where there identifiable
| "sides" - e.g. war stories where both sides have media outlets.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| 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).
|
| I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have.
| Cheers Philipp
| teapourer wrote:
| Really nice idea and implementation. How did you determine each
| source's placement on the left/right spectrum?
| Hadjimina wrote:
| I used the rating from adfontesmedia
| (https://www.adfontesmedia.com/)
| Quanttek wrote:
| 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-
| 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 instead.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| 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
| giantg2 wrote:
| 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).
| imiric wrote:
| Exactly. The biases are per news source and actually
| constant: https://github.com/Hadjimina/perspectiveNews/blob/0
| c4c6a932a...
|
| 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/ 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.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| Their news was chosen b.c. it's simple and because the
| point of the website is to inform yourself about their news
| (i.e. other peoples' news). Thanks for pointing it out
| though. I did not think about that.
| loonster wrote:
| Could probably do this with just searching for adjectives.
| Instead of a right/left news display it would be a
| positive/negative display.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| I had a version that tried to do sentiment analysis on
| the article text and display an emoji below it. The idea
| being that one a certain issue you might only see
| positive emojis on the right and only negative ones on
| the left (or vice versa). Buuut it did not really work
| out so I scrapped it again.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "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."
|
| I completely agree.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Unless using machine learning to process based on more
| granular criteria.
| hnhg wrote:
| 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...
|
| 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.
| eganist wrote:
| > 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-
| 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
| barry-cotter wrote:
| I'm impressed. This really shows the utility of lying
| often, loudly, publicly and repeatedly in shaping public
| opinion and perception. I stopped reading any British
| newspaper but the Guardian in the early 2000s but the idea
| that it's any less partisan than the Fabian Society...
| pessimizer wrote:
| Tory UK tends to characterize the Guardian as raving lefty
| lunatics, just as the right characterizes the NYT in the
| US.
| nomdep wrote:
| Not lunatics but very raving leftist for the last four
| years.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| 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/
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I'd say that it's essentially _all_ editorial at this
| point.
|
| It strikes me as several waves peaking at the same time.
| One being normal civilization cycles that result in
| political violence, another being a death of professional
| standards in reporting. To be fair, some eras of
| broadsheets, pamphlets, newspapers were just as
| manipulative as the modern ones.
|
| A practice I try to stick to is to read non-Anglosphere
| (and particularly non-US) newspapers only. For one thing,
| the rest of the world appears to keep on keepin' on and
| isn't overly concerned with the minutiae of US palace
| politics or the Chauvin trial.
| makomk wrote:
| I think that mostly shows the limits of their analysis. The
| Guardian is basically _the_ left-wing paper in the UK; I
| don 't think there's anything to the left of them outside
| of fairly fringe, niche, and very fragmented publications.
| Internal disputes within the left play out within their
| comment section, whilst the news section often seems to
| attacking the right wing as its main goal.
| eganist wrote:
| > I think that mostly shows the limits of their analysis.
| The Guardian is basically the left-wing paper in the UK;
| I don't think there's anything to the left of them
| outside of fairly fringe, niche, and very fragmented
| publications. Internal disputes within the left play out
| within their comment section, whilst the news section
| often seems to attacking the right wing as its main goal.
|
| This only reinforces the meta-point. Everyone's sharing
| their _perception_ without citing anything. So far, the
| few research entities looking into media bias are all
| asserting (with randomly sampled data points as best as I
| can tell) that The Guardian presents reliable news with a
| left-leaning opinion skew, whereas self-selected
| commenters (i.e. those who chose to reply to my initial
| comment) here are asserting from their own perception
| that The Guardian 's "basically _the_ left-wing paper, "
| "editorial is usually pretty far left," and "quite on the
| left."
|
| There's value in learning the methodologies employed by
| these analysis firms and think tanks, deciding whether
| you agree with how their analysis is performed, and upon
| deciding, either performing the same (time consuming)
| analysis yourself or delegating to the group(s) who's
| methods you most align with. That's largely why I'm fine
| with Ad Fontes. I haven't looked into how AllSides draws
| their conclusions, but either way, they're both in
| agreement re: The Guardian.
|
| This is a healthier way to conclude how a news outlet
| leans compared to just going by our own perception.
| beardyw wrote:
| Your comment about the Guardian prompted me to check and
| it turns out there is a comprehensive page on Wikipedia.
| Who knew? The Guardian isn't on it but the Daily Mirror
| is - not sure I understand why since I would pretty much
| agree with you.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_left-
| wing_publicatio...
| SunlightEdge wrote:
| Agreed on biased perceptions of the guardian.
|
| Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception out there that
| the Guardian's comment section in particular is pretty
| left wing particularly on identity politics stuff. Even
| if the core paper is pretty central - e.g. It broadly
| supported the Blairites over the Corbynites over past few
| years.
|
| It would be really interesting to have some visual data
| on their comments section here compared to other papers
| e.g. of numbers of articles on say class, race, gender
| and some kind of ranking of their left wing / right wing
| strength. And likewise for regular reported core
| news/articles.
|
| As it stands there might be a lot of bias in people's
| individual views- including this comment.
|
| Still it is interesting to compare articles. It's a cool
| site.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I see that CNN is in the middle-of-the-road section.
|
| Search 'Trump' (naturally, it's currently the best test
| case) and you get:
|
| "Former President Donald Trump repeated familiar lies
| about the 2020 election and insulted Senate Minority
| Leader Mitch McConnell Saturday when speaking to
| Republican National Committee donors gathered for the
| first time since Trump's defeat, a person in the room
| told CNN."
|
| 'familiar lies' 'insulted' 'a person in the room told'
|
| The Weekly World News has taken over the world.
| rsynnott wrote:
| ... What would the proper ultra-centrist way of
| characterising lying and insulting Mitch McConnell be?
| Like, are you expecting them to use euphemisms, or just
| not reporting on former presidents lying?
| Hadjimina wrote:
| 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.
| wffurr wrote:
| 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?
| gremlinsinc wrote:
| 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.
| loonster wrote:
| Reddit did a huge purge of conservatives in the past couple
| years (2020 especially). You will have to go somewhere else
| if you truly want a conservative viewpoint.
| wffurr wrote:
| ITYM they banned people for posting content encouraging
| violence and harassment, violating the terms of service.
|
| It just so happened that some large conservative subs
| were engaging in that behavior.
|
| Curious, isn't it?
| loonster wrote:
| They banned quite a but more than that. * Bans for
| mentioning a news article that mentioned the site of
| Hunter Biden's laptop leak. * Bans for disagreeing with
| the mask policies. * Bans for posting COVID-19 studies
| that are different than what is mainstream. * Bans for
| posting articles of a politician that is also an admin. *
| Bans for discussing election fraud. * Bans for upvoting
| content.
|
| The place has turned toxic.
| mavhc wrote:
| Not really a great advert for the intellectual heft of
| the right wing
| watwut wrote:
| That is not true. There are conservative subs. And in the
| same purges, let leading subs were closed for the similar
| issues.
|
| You however don't hear complaining on HR when leftist
| subs are closed.
| loonster wrote:
| It's not the subs, it the individual users that were
| purged the most. Some for the most grievous sin of
| upvoting wrongthink.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| That's what popping a filter bubble feels like. I followed
| Jacobin and a bunch of other accounts of people I disagree
| with when I started on Twitter. Learning more about people
| who hate you, your philosophy, beliefs and identities does
| not lead to any great improvements in your life so I stopped.
|
| Yes, the politically engaged out group really is like that.
| They really do hate you.
| mistermann wrote:
| If just for fun, as a kind of thought experiment I suppose,
| a person decomposed this comment, unpacking each word or
| phrase into its pedantically precise meaning in this
| context, spending several hours on the task to squeeze
| every last drop of unambiguous meaning out of the the
| words, and then contemplated a literal reading of the final
| product in its uncompressed form...might this undertaking
| yield any interesting results?
|
| Maybe it's not clear what I have in mind, so I will give an
| example: the words "people", "you", "they"...what do these
| words refer to, _precisely and explicitly_ (what entities
| do they encompass, and what do they not encompass)?
| barry-cotter wrote:
| There are _many, many_ people who would happily put you
| and your family in a gulag or concentration camp for your
| political beliefs if you have any, whatever they are.
| There are lots of people who believe that achieving their
| utopia is worth a lot of dead men, women and children.
| This is true whether you would pick the fascists or the
| communists given a forced choice between the two.
| mistermann wrote:
| I'm not saying it isn't plausible, and history contains
| many examples of such behavior, but my point is that the
| mind has this ability to imagine various scenarios of
| what _could be true_ , but we speak of these
| neurologically generated virtual scenarios _as if they
| are actually true_. In this example, you even literally
| use the word "true" when referring to these ideas,
| demonstrating how real these simulated scenarios seem -
| to the mind, they are often indistinguishable from actual
| knowledge and first person experiences.
|
| This phenomenon is ever present in human behavior, in
| everything we do. In science, engineering, manufacturing,
| and "most" activities that humans engage in within the
| economic sphere, we typically apply fairly rigorous
| scrutiny to competing theories (consciously controlled
| imaginations) about the current and potential future
| states of reality, and as a result we tend to produce
| high quality and sometimes even amazing results
| (splitting the atom, landing robots on Mars, antibiotics
| & vaccines, the internet, etc)...but when it comes to
| normal day to day activities (our "actual lives", the
| underlying reason most people do all these other things
| at our place of employment), we seem to not only not
| apply similar levels of scrutiny to our thinking, but
| most people seem to consider the very idea to be
| outrageous, often passionately so.
|
| I think it's an interesting way to think about the world.
| Perhaps there is even some future value in thinking about
| the world in different ways, as there has been in the
| past.
| kolinko wrote:
| I actially prefer reading the news from ,,the other side".
|
| I know very well news from ,,my" side from friends and the
| Facebook/twitter bubble, but I want to know the other
| viewpoints as well.
|
| Even if 70-90% of it is pure crap, I found that often ,,my"
| side is just as guilty of ommiting parts of information, and
| presenting things with sometimes extreme bias.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| I was having lunch with a friend of mine recently, and he
| remarked that of his friends he had, I was the closest to
| being a Republican and he wondered what news site I read.
|
| He was surprised to learn that my go-tos were generally to
| the left of what he read, for exactly the reason you
| describe.
|
| If a story is getting attention across the spectrum, 'the
| opposition' is always more likely to capture the facts that
| you might miss.
| grawprog wrote:
| Because if you actually stop to look at 'their' side and
| compare the news stories to 'your' side, you'll find both
| sides are full of exactly the same kind of loaded subjective
| language, usually written in the same adversarial tone and
| distort truth in some way to fit an agenda.
|
| In some cases you can literally take a story from one side,
| swap all the adjectives so they have the opposite meaning and
| congrats, you've now written a story for the other side.
|
| https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c
| riskable wrote:
| > In some cases you can literally take a story from one
| side, swap all the adjectives so they have the opposite
| meaning and congrats, you've now written a story for the
| other side.
|
| This is not how media bias works. What you're referring to
| is how propaganda works (well, one type anyway: Where you
| report the opposite of the truth in order to confuse people
| into thinking, "I don't know who to believe anymore").
|
| > https://youtu.be/xiYZ__Ww02c
|
| You know this video is satire, right? It's not real yet I'm
| getting a hint here that you might have taken it at face
| value.
| watwut wrote:
| That is not actually true. Not in terms of how the person
| doing reading will perceive it. And not in terms of how
| world works.
|
| Real world is not perfectly symmetrical. It is not composed
| of two sides in the first place. In the second, even if you
| roughly split it, it rare ends up as "both are the same".
| That ideology of perfect center is just emotionally
| convenient model.
| Hadjimina wrote:
| 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.
| d0mine wrote:
| Note: there may be other options how the same events are
| covered e.g., China, EU, Russia
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