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Ask Skewz.com Founder About Detecting Media Bias

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the only-a-journalist-who-agrees-with-me-about-everyting-is-totally-unbiased dept.

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.)

2 of 299 comments (clear)

  1. So what in general is the media. by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The Left say the media is to Right.
    The Right say the media is to Left.

    How do you prevent your own views from skewing the results. Because someone who is Left or Right of Moderate would consider themselfs a moderate, while they are not truely moderate. So they would True Moderate coverage as Slightly to the Left or Right.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  2. How will you account for response bias? by moderatorrater · · Score: 5, Interesting

    How will you keep the results from being biased by the responders? For instance, if you were to have more links to this from fox news than from other news outlets, you would get a large number of conservatives rating stories. In that instance, you would get a lot of people saying that right-leaning stories are more unbiased and more unbiased stories would be rated liberal. The opposite would be true too; if you get a lot of traffic from moveon.org, there's going to be a large number of people rating things as conservatively biased.

    This effect could even arise from random fluctuations with a small enough response group, and unless this is controlled, your site could eventually be labelled as "conservative" or "liberal" which would discourage the opposite group from voting, possibly providing a feedback mechanism for bias.

    How would you prevent this from happening while still allowing users to generate the results?