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Ask Skewz.com Founder About Detecting Media Bias
Skewz.com is not the Microsoft-funded Blews experiment that is supposed to help detect rightness and leftness in stories based on blogs that link to them. Instead of detecting blog links, Skewz relies on readers to submit and rate stories, and even tries to pair stories that have "liberal" and "conservative" biases so that you can get multiple takes on the same event or pronouncement. The Skewz About page explains how it works. The site has drawn a fair amount of "media insider" attention, including a writeup on the Poynter Institute website. But what does all this mean? Where is it going? Can Skewz.com help us sort our news better and make more informed decisions? We don't know. But if you post a question here for founder Vipul Vyas, maybe he'll have an answer for you. (Please try to follow the usual Slashdot interview rules.)
I still do not understand why everything is left/right. Reality tends to be complicated and every story has a lot more aspects than left/right (even if you manage to define those two terms).
So, is sexual impropriety liberal (Clinton) or conservative (Gingerich)?
How about economic activism (Greenspan)?
What about pro-war?
How about government hypervigilance against its own citizens?
How about abortion?
What about economic stimulus?
How about WTO?
Honestly, with the way all the votes actually go when a liberal or conservative party has control of everything, I have to say that in each of these cases, the "liberal" and "conservative" positions are identical, and the opposite position has no coverage.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Shouldn't just "being full of shit" count for anything? Why not just rate stories on their frequencies of lies, distortions, unsupported assertions, and factual inaccuracies?
That's what gives the impression of "bias" to a reader in the first place.
What is the point of providing only two "balancing" stories with "liberal" vs "conservative" biases, when neither "liberal" nor "conservative" are labels with any real meaning except propaganda buzzwords, when the two illusory groups agree on so much but also mutually exclude so much not falling under their convenient labels, and when there are so many other viewpoints? A point other than validating the grossest oversimplification of the world since "right brain / left brain" dumbed down psychology to meaningless twaddle, that is.
And when one or the other is just wrong, why dignify them as "balance"? What's the point of balancing lies against truth?
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make install -not war
that's because there is clear right wing bias on pretty much everything.
Fox news, along with many other well funded members of the ultra-conservative propaganda machine which has arisen since media deregulation allowed massive consolidation, foists biased reporting on real news--and often fraudulent or intellectually dishonest slander--into the mainstream media, pulling it to the right.
I won't even bother going into talk radio.
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1. Let's postulate that the work that is expected of a journalist is to present situations with evenhandedness (especially when it comes to forward-looking and current events with fuzzy delineations). You may wish to challenge that assumption, but I would believe the majority of the population would feel and expect it should be so and be surprised and interested to hear when it is shown not to.
If you say that it's okay for a journalist to "fight his or her case" with language bias etc - why does this not apply to any other employee group in society? Why cannot, say, a bank employee, promote their political sense of right and wrong by denying someone a loan because they feel his politics are bad? Why can't a plumber charge someone extra if they know they are a member of party X?
Effectively, if a journalistic right to bias is simply the right to express your preferences, and this includes giving a tougher deal for certain people, why isn't that right shared with any other job group?
2. Let's consider minority group X and how it is portrayed in any given communication. It is my impression that there is a strong overlap between those who speak the loudest and most often about protecting minorities, and those who speak the loudest and most often in disfavor of action being taken about press bias if it does exist, hence I feel the question may be appropriately targeted.
You may well agree that discrimination and disenfranchisement for group X may come through in communications in very subtle ways. In other words you would likely reject that discrimination is only discrimination if it comes through in explicit and strong wording, and rather say that people can use discriminating wording through very subtle methods, just by the words chosen, sentence structure, tone of voice, etc. In this case you will likely also say that a detection method for discrimination cannot rely just on detecting blatant examples of discriminatory wording, but must also detect and assign equal weights to these subtle forms.
In this case however, why would you be opposed to similar analysis of subtle clues and sentence structures in journalistic productions? For example, if the body language of a night club bouncer may be detected to be discriminatory, why cannot the body language of a journalist be examined for bias?
Oh my lack of god yes! Funny thing is, I just finished replying to a post accusing me of being a "rabid ultra-left Democrat" with:
You've been had. Just like racism is a way to get poor white folks fighting poor brown folk so they don't realize most of their problems have nothing to do with color. The policies that lead to the rich getting richer and the poor paying the bill transcend the Democratic/Republican divide.
I agree that the article doesn't express any bias in it's tone by just reporting the "facts". The bias comes from the choice of what "facts" to state. The statistics in the article are for graduation within only 12 years. The statistics would claim that a child who repeated kindergarten doesn't count when he graduates after 13 years of public school. And the stats are still rather obviously difficult to believe Come on, Detroit only graduates 24% of students. You believe that ? Only 70% of students graduate nation wide ? You believe that ?
How about the US Census Bureau statistics: "85 percent of adults age 25 and over had completed at least high school, an all-time high" http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/001863.html
How about Child Trends: "Dropout rates of young people ages 16 to 24 in the civilian, non-institutionalized population gradually declined between 1972 and 2005, from 15 percent to a low of 9 in 2005."
Choosing what nonsense to report also exposes a bias.
The last administrations have done nothing to return states rights, and in fact have moved the Executive Branch further outside the bounds of congressional and even judicial oversight. There's no such thing as left and right in American Government. They pander to the left or the right, but their focus is on more government control. They both start the same wars, participate in the same corruption.
The two wedge issues are gay marriage and abortion for the right, which would never survive the "clear and secular purpose" litmus test, and the wedge issues for the left are "Bush is dumb" and "we want change," despite the fact there are no real policy differences. One side refuses to take nuclear options off the table in dealing with Iran, and the other side refuses to take nuclear options off the table when dealing with Iran.
It's really quite beautiful when you think about it. America is a One Party State, complete with gerrymandered lines and mass media that shuts out thirty party options. Why argue about things like our right to interfere in the affairs of sovereign nations when you can just leave that out of the discussion entirely?
I would say that correlation is due to a couple of factors and not that Democrats are Smarter Then Republicans.
Issue One: Republicans are more business friendly. So if you are a republican you are more likely to skip higher education or not go for advanced degrees and go straight to the work force.
Issue Two: University Professors Unions. Being that most professors belong to a Union (which are rather tighly linked to the democratic party) they will not try to speak out against the Unions or their problems. I have one Professor who whispers to the class and tells them not to let it out that she feels there should be factors in place to judge the professors performance. She is afraid to be vocal about it because of the political problems it causes.
Issue Three: Durring the Vietanam War a lot of people who wanted to avoid going to war (who had predominanatly left personalities) went to colleges as a sanctuary from getting drafted. Now many of them are professors.
Issue Four: Because of 1,2 and 3 when teaching students the professor ingrain the students minds the democrat ideals (even if it is uninentional) So the students learn to like the Democrat Phelosophy and Distrust the republican phelosopy. And Imbreed a new generation of Democrat Professors.
Issue Five: If you are a Republican/Consiritive you feel out of place in a liberal insitution so you are not as willing to stay there for longer then you have to.
Issue Six: The Liberal Phelosophy of Comunity vs. the Consertive Phelosophy of self reliance. So Liberals want to work for the greater good, while Consertives work to improve themselfs.
There are a bunch of issues and they are not due to because Person A is smart they will oviously realize that Democrats are better. It is more of Democrats will thrive in our education system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Hmm, the Microsoft attempt looks more sophisticated: http://research.microsoft.com/~chrisko/papers/ICWSM_paper.pdf, albeit totally orthogonal to what skewz.com does.
Are you guys using machine learning at all? If not, how do you protect yourselves against user bias (e.g. the situation where liberals like your site and conservatives don't, so you get mostly liberal stories). Personally, it seems to me that Skewz is just a glorified Digg with sliders.
Because the American media sucks balls, that's why. Reporters have been replaced with "annalists". Rampant consolidation has reduced the number of viewpoints, and given the media an incredible pro-corporate bias; business interests outnumber labor or consumer representatives by something like 20 to 1.
After decades of conservatives complaining about a non-existent "liberal bias" in the media, the press goes incredibly easy on Republicans (like CNN splicing video to make McCain look better on his false claims linking Iran to Al Queda) while playing hardball with Democrats (like when Tim Russert lambasted Howard Dean for not knowing the exact number of Americans in the armed forces, when he gave Bush a complete pass on a similar question about nuclear missiles in 1999).
Or how uniformly pro-war the media has been since Bush took office: now as in 2002, the "serious foreign policy analysts" invited to discuss the Iraq mess are pro-war hawks who have been wrong on Iraq every step of the way. Those who opposed the invasion on strategic grounds are as excluded from the debate now as they were 6 years ago.
So in many cases, yes, you'll find that the foreign presses coverage of American events is far superior to that of the American media.