Every news source has its bias, and that is especially true for political news. The same story on the Huffington Post is more likely to have a liberal slant than something on Fox News. Most people figure out which news sources share political views and settle on a few which make them feel comfortable. For those who have trouble identifying left from right, there is now FairSpin, a site that looks like it just launched today.
FairSpin takes the most buzzed about news stories from memeorandum (the sister site to Techmeme, but for politics), and lays them out on a page literally from left to right. The Huffington Post, Talking Points memo, and Washington Monthly stories are on the left. The Washington post and New York Times stories are in the middle. And the Wall Street Journal Op-ed and Fox News stories are on the right.
If you don’t agree with this pacement, then you can vote on any story, indicating whether you think it’s bias is left-leaning, right-leaning, or “fair.” (I am not sure whether a neutral leaning is more fair than any other, or simply wishy-washy). When you click through to a story, it presents it under a toolbar (yes, yet another frame) with its own shortened URL, which lets you cast your vote and return easily to FairSpin. For instance, this link http://fairspin.org/read/5093 takes you to a Michelle Malkin post. (This doesn’t work for New York Times articles, however, because it has disabled such toolbars and non-redirecting URL shorteners after the whole Diggbar controversy).
FairSpin shows you your voting history, as well as the community’s, and allows you to hide “highly-biased” stories. It neatly lays out visually what many readers already know, but is a helpful filter nonetheless. Just ignore the side which offends you the most.
The site was developed by Stephen Hood, who until recently ran Delicious for Yahoo, and Dave Baggeroer, a designer. You can read more about it on their blog.
Stephen Hood most recently ran the social bookmarking service Delicious at Yahoo. Based on this experience Stephen is a big believer in the power of the community to organize information and accomplish goals, and sees an opportunity to mobilize readers to identify bias in the news. Dave Baggeroer
So if you read an article and think it’s right, vote it to the right. If you think it’s wrong,…
this would only work if there is an equal number of right and left using this site which is a flawed assumption. This site will eventually tilt left like most social networked/news sites because of the liberal tilt of internet users…see digg, reddit, facebook (compare fans of mccain to obama) and daily kos as examples. i mean even hacker news which is where i have been going lately so i don’t have to read a bunch of political stories is beginning to turn political. If you say that there are conservative counterparts like michelle malkin, there hit rate is much less than sites like huffingtonpost.
good luck nonetheless.
I agree, mostly. The best you can hope for would be to identify the mean of the people who visit the site. However, I do think that the people who would be interested in using the service ostensibly would be more interested in the middle than the left or the right, since they’re probably the most interested in identifying media bias.
VoteOften, http://www.voteoften.us/ has a nicer bias voting implementation. But just like this site, it really seems like it needs a lot of users to work well. TechCrunch featured VoteOften early last year, but I guess it never picked up a lot of steam.
Yeah, I agree that this will be inherently predisposed to identify left-winged media biased as more “mainstream” or “neutral”, while judging more balanced or right-winged media more harshly “partisan”… case in point, identifying the NYT as “neutral”. The main problem is that media doesn’t have an even distribution (bell curve) of bias, so you true mean isn’t 0 bias… it is actually a few units left of center (which throws off relative comparisons).
Exactly. When I read above “…NY times stories in the middle” I literally laughed out loud.
C-Span is in the middle and that’s pretty much it.
At the very least, it’s going to take a while to get a relatively accurate idea of what slants what way. But even then…there’s a lot of people who would laugh at the idea of the Washington Post being in the middle, and I know conservatives who think that the opposite of Rush Limbaugh is NPR.
Maybe there are enough people with a truly unbiased point of view to give Fairspin an accurate point of view, but…good luck.
A simple left-to-right spectrum has to be a vast oversimplification of the political biases of various news sources.
Isn’t this exactly what NewsCred is doing? Or NewsTrust?
My favorite site for handling this is:
http://skewz.com
The site divides all news sources into left-bias or right-bias news.
My question is so what? What does this do for me? It doesn’t surface, particularly well, articles I haven’t seen – but would I really be unclear on the biases in the stories just based on the websites from which they come? Do I really need to know that Michelle Malkin is a right-wing article writer? That’s not exactly shocking news….
It’s more information. It’s really up to you if you need it or not.
Many writers make their biases clear. People should realize immediately that David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, and Sean Hannity are to the right. But how much to the right? For example, Sean Hannity and Michele Malkin probably see Peggy Noonan and David Brooks as closet moderates.
While, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, and Cokie Roberts are all liberals, how liberal are they? Are they as liberal as MoveOn.org (as many conservatives would suggest) or are they more moderate? Bill O’Reilly used to say he was against the death penalty (I haven’t watched the show in years so I have no idea if he’s still against it). Ann Coulter is good friends with Bill Maher (she used to appear all the time on Politically Incorrect).
If you are a political junkie like me, then web sites that call out all the biases can really help.
If you’re a political junkie, you already know the biases – again, I just don’t see who this product serves. Looking at the other similar sites listed, I would never bother to visit any of them again.
If you’re a political junkie, shouldn’t u already know the biases?
Plus, the site doesn’t tell you which way a story is leaning? It only starts off that way. People have to vote on it to see which way its leaning. The problem with this starts with a bunch of ultra cons voting on liberal con stories as liberal………
I appreciate that if I tell you I’m a political junkie, you think that I know everything.
I just meant that I am fascinated at hearing both sides of an issue, figuring out people’s biases, and trying to actually figure out the best course of action.
I agree with you that these sites are not perfect and there is room for improvement.
I’m only suggesting that for a certain market (such as myself), these sites are very interesting.
Interesting experiment but voters will be very self-selecting as mentioned above. Also, FWIW, Stephen Hood was an Obama donor:
http://fundrace...p;fname=Stephen
Why not just simply teach people how to recognize bias. If they can think for themselves it would seem far more important than telling someone what to think.
One other thing I would add is as others have suggested that the political spectrum is a spectrum and not a neat divide of left to right. I consider most democrats to be conservatives. Even Obama is a conservative by any measure unless you are Fox news of course. I dont think we have had any modern liberal presidents. I also think most news “liberal” news outlets are mostly just democrat outlets, few being truly liberal. I guess this is coming from a way way left view point. But the same could be said of conservatives many whom would not want to be associated with the likes of Fox news and consider that just to be a propaganda machine rather than the mouth piece of the conservative movement. Not every conservative considers what Fox does to be conservative nor is every mainstream conservative issue such as stopping gay rights something that every conservative feels should be an issue.
I think a better (or at least an add-on) site would be one that digs out political spins in regular TV shows and movies. I believe a site that did that could become a resource and gain a fairly large traffic share. Everyone already knows (at least those that are capable of knowing) that all the political news sites push their own flavor of propaganda.
This is going to fail. People will vote based upon their own bias. Period. And, from what I’ve seen, people with enough time on their hands (*cough cough*) to comment on things on the internet tend to lean left.
I am to believe that its a “fair spin” when they position the New York Times and the Washington Post in the middle of the political spectrum?
The axis has shifted quite a bit since the election, but not that much.
Hi everyone — Thanks for trying it out and sharing your thoughts. Plenty of good points raised. We’ve tried to address some of the big ones on our blog, here:
http://blog.fai...nd-some-answers
Thanks again for the feedback; we’re listening.
I agree, mostly. The best you can hope for would be to identify the mean of the people who visit the site. However, I do think that the people who would be interested in using the service