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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
What do you offer to entice users to register and rank stories for you? It seems that the benefits just come from the people that do all the work, is your only incentive that the person feels good for helping you out? Do you rank your users? Is there a reward system even if it's only number of stories ranked?
The article said you are hoping to raise your current set of 600 users to something more like 10,000--what are you doing to accomplish that?
My work here is dung.
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?
--
make install -not war
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.
I listen to a lot of NPR news stories and the majority of my fellow Americans find these stories to be tilting to the left. I see them as unbiased an, as a result, am often labeled a liberal. How do you plan on dealing with different countries that have populaces with different mindsets? For example you cover stories on abortion and in some countries this is legal at any stage and others it is not. I would expect the citizens of a country where it is illegal to view any story allowing it in only the first trimester to be very liberal while in the USA that may be viewed as a more balanced middle ground. Do you cater (inadvertently or on purpose) to one single population/area/demographic?
My work here is dung.
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?
This will merely attract the obsessive ultra-right crusaders to dump "left wing bias" en masse on everything.
Actually, a quick look at the site makes it look like the "far left kool-aid drinkers" (I think that's the right way to put it) are dumping "right wing bias" en masse on everything.
You are right, though. It's still not an accurate measure of bias. Some of the new stories appear to be filtered primarily by source rather than any particular bias. And some of the stories exist in the gray area, and don't have a really discernible bias.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Skews makes no sense. Take this article as an example:
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080401184532.kxjxy7xo&show_article=1
It's an AFP wire story with completely straight, factual reporting about high school graduation rates in the USA. There is no commentary from the author whatsoever. However Skewz users rate the story as "Liberal", giving it 2.5 out of 5 points on the Liberal scale. I'm having a hard time seeing the logic there. How can a purely factual report on this topic possibly be considered leftist?
Right now, I think the consensus on slashdot is that this website as described would not be worth a first visit. But maybe it could be made worthwhile.
Let me put forward my brother's idea, in conjunction to a reply to this post. First, the reply:
If liberal/conservative means bunk to you -- as it will to most slashdotters -- surely the same process could be applied to a different division that is important to you "high tech/low tech" "wicked/humble" or whatever you want.
You might not care about labeling something "left/right", but you might care about "true/false".
Surely the software that can handle lib/cons could handle other pairs as easily.
So you pick from a whole list of pairs, and if you don't see a pair you like, you create one. The rating from the pair then will also generate a definition straight from dictionary.com, so that anyone who rates based on that pair, will see what the definition is as they rate it.
Now, let me combine it with my brother's idea. You create your own ratings profile, rating articles as you see fit, and the site does its best to give you articles that you would like.
But you also tie into that ratings from friends of yours that you respect. So you can say "make my true/false rating reflect 40% from band_shark, 20% from the general pool, and 40% from slashdotters."
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Given that you aren't American, why should I listen to you or your site's take on American news and politics? Would someone in Mumbai honestly care about how Americans view their politics and news media?
What about when both parties reach a consensus and the story ranks 100% liberal and 100% conservative? Does the system explode? Is this a new sort of Quantum Computer? Enlighten me, please! (but hey, be fair and balanced, will you?)
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.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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.
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?
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.
1) Right-wing bias of the study's authors including or excluding data:
Wanting to make sure the ACLU appears left-leaning by excluding data:
Wanting to make sure that RAND appears left-leaning by including data:
You can't pick and choose. Either include all of this type of data or exclude it -- don't just pick what supports your beliefs.
2) Right-wing bias in algorithm selection
Study admits that Fox News is way off in right-field if the actual average of Congress is taken:
Table 3:
Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume 6/1/98 - 6/26/03 39.7 1.9
Figure 2 shows Fox and Washington Times far right of every other news outlet.
3) Study authors omit outright lies.
Citation 21:
Like us, Mullainathan and Shleifer (2003) define bias as an instance where a journalist fails to report a relevant fact, rather than chooses to report a false fact.
4) Different measures of center would seem to nullify any bias other than Fox and Wash. Times due to wide variances
Citation 34
"Yet another measure
Citation 35 "If instead we use medians, the figure is 54.9"
The results are muddled at best. The authors clearly massage data to their liking (at least they admitted it), but this only serves to shoot down the whole paper. The study is fun to look at for entertainment, but its conclusions can hardly be taken seriously due to all the cherry picking, massaging, questionable data gathering, and just plain inconclusive data.
Yes American here however I'll take issue a bit and say that religion and the "right" has been noted by politcal researchers using sound emperical methods, see for example:
.02
"In 1939, Leonard W. Ferguson carried out an analysis of political values using ten scales measuring attitudes toward:
* War
* Reality of God
* Patriotism
* Treatment of criminals
* Capital punishment
* Censorship
* Evolution
* Birth control
* Law, and
* Communism
Submitting the results to factor analysis, he was able to identify three factors, which he named Religionism, Humanitarianism, and Nationalism. Ferguson's Religionism was defined by belief in God and negative attitudes toward evolution and birth control; Humanitarianism was related to attitudes opposing the harsh treatment of criminals, capital punishment, and war; and Nationalism described variation in opinions on censorship, law, patriotism, and communism. Note that this system was derived through purely empirical methods; rather than devising a political model on purely theoretical grounds and testing it, Ferguson's research was purely exploratory. Although replication of the Nationalism factor was spotty, the finding of Religionism and Humanitarianism had a number of replications by Ferguson and others.[1][2]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_spectrum
As I said I think the definitions of left and right are pretty muddied these days but I do think there are worthwhile differences to note between secular humanistic thinkers who we may label "left" for lack of better terms and those with a more tough minded religous thought who we may label right wing.
Just my
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
My view of government is described in the American Declaration of Independence.
- The People are the ultimate authority.
- The government only exists because the People created it.
- It is granted SOME power by the People to protect human rights (unified defense, for example).
- All other powers not granted to the government by the Constitutional contract, is reserved to the People.
That's my view of government, and it is supplemented by Thomas Jefferson's writings. For example he wrote, "If it were possible to have no government at all, we would do it. It is only to secure our rights that we resort to any government at all." James Madison made a similar comment, "If men were angels, we would not need government."
So the job of government is to be a servant to its master (the People) and protect individual rights.
And nothing else.
i.e. The government's job is Not to raid my neighbors' wallets, take their money, and give it to me so I can buy a house. That is Not the job or purpose for which the People created the government. On the contrary, such an action violates my neighbors' rights of property and labor.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.