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.)

Comments

Are all americans one dimensional

[line-bundle]

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).

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[chunk08]

True. Not all issues can be defined with left/right. However, in politics, we can generalize (oh the horror) thus: Left: Do as much as possible through government, especially welfare and education. Less free market. Higher taxes, more government benefits Right: Do as much as possible in the private sector. This includes welfare (private charities) and education. Lower taxes, less government benefits. Now this does not cover every issue, but it gives a general idea of the philosophies that an intelligent person can apply.

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[h4rm0ny]

I'd say both definitions are (a) grossly inadquate as a basis for categorising political viewpoints which are massively more complicated and (b) merely attitudes that do not necessarily equate to the outcomes of any given policy. The divisive split between "left" and "right" is one of the things that most cripples democracy in the USA, today. By labelling something as belonging to one faction or another, serious consideration of the merits of a particular action can be derailed. Maybe tax cuts are the right thing at a given time to stimulate the economy. Maybe state aid to a faltering financial institution is going to head off disaster on another occasion. But instead of assessing ideas as good or bad, "left" and "right" become substitutes for good and bad and nothing needs to be said beyond that. Never mind that often enough it is not appropriate to categorise things in these terms. It seems half the time that political beliefs are treated as merely territory to be captured by "left" or "right" and claimed as fitting that faction's ideology.

In the words of the immortal Bill Hicks (well, except that he's dead): "Hey, waitaminute! It's one guy holding up both puppets!"

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[Gordonjcp]

Actually, it's simpler than that:

Left = Quality of life at the expense of economic growth

Right = Economic growth at the expense of everything else, no matter what the cost

You see this in the US, where schools and hospitals are run purely to generate profit, with the barest minimum of education or care provided (got to keep those overheads down, no matter what!)

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[ScienceDada]

Your definition is completely reversed.
The "Left" is for strong central government--as you say, "top down"--(i.e. Federal government).
The "Right" is for strong local control--as you say, bottom-up--i.e. States' rights.
In America, these have been opposing sides since the framing of the Constitution.

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[Naughty Bob]

They are useful, though massively abstract concepts- nobody is saying that the terms themselves are 'seeds' from which entire Philosophies are able to be derived. Interestingly, the terms originated from the old French parliament, where the Aristocrats sat to the right of the King, and the commoners sat to the left.

The divisive split between "left" and "right" is one of the things that most cripples democracy in the USA, today.

Correction: The divisive split between "Right" and "Far Right" is one of the things that most cripples democracy in the USA, today.

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[inviolet]

I'd say both definitions are (a) grossly inadquate as a basis for categorising political viewpoints which are massively more complicated and (b) merely attitudes that do not necessarily equate to the outcomes of any given policy. The divisive split between "left" and "right" is one of the things that most cripples democracy in the USA, today. By labelling something as belonging to one faction or another, serious consideration of the merits of a particular action can be derailed.

Serious consideration is derailed, indeed, but it's not a conspiracy. It is simply human nature to find simple categories with which to make predictions and choices. Any consideration of nuances, shades of grey, contradiction and ambiguity, requires a lot of mental energy... not to mention more mental hardware than many people have to begin with.

Mental energy is a more precious resource than money, and even more than time. We all have more time than we have energy -- that's why we come home at night and "vege out".

This is why most political arguments are fights over categorization... once a thing has been categorized (and we all feel an urgent need to do so for any issues that remain expensively uncategorized), we can apply very simple logic when dealing with it again. White hat, good guy; black hat, bad guy.

An example: although ethanol logically belongs in the category of "mind-altering addictive substances", we lack the political will to admit it, because if we announce "alcohol is in the category of 'drug'", we'll then be obliged to apply our "drug == bad" logic to it.

Lord knows how I ever got hooked up with this godforsaken species. Where's the damned mothership already?

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[Mr. Slippery]

The "Left" is for strong central government--as you say, "top down"--(i.e. Federal government). The "Right" is for strong local control--as you say, bottom-up--i.e. States' rights.

So neocons who have striven to extend the power of the federal government are leftists? And Greens who work for more local control are right-wingers?

No. Federalist versus anti-federalist is a different dimension from left versus right.

The political terms left and right date to the French revolution, when nobility sat on the right and commoners on the left of the legislature. In modern terms, they refer to Labor and Capital. To be in favor of the interests of investors and owners is to be on the right; to be in favor of the interests of workers and ordinary citizens is to be on the left.

It doesn't matter whether you're an Maoist who believes in dictatorship of the peasants, or a anarchist who believes in no government and thus no private capital, you're a leftist; and it doesn't matter if you're a plutocrat who believes that the rich should control the government, or a libertarian capitalist in the minimal government that can enforce strong property rights, you're a right-winger.

Various alliances made over the years have obscured this, to the point where people think of gun control, censorship, abortion, foreign policy, and many other issues in left/right terms, but that's fuzzy thinking. Politics is multi-dimensional, and left-right is just one axis.

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[Kelz]

Thanks for being the problem.

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[PopeRatzo]

it shouldn't be either left or right, because the middle ground is often a very good one.

Here's teh problem with that, Jugulator: Through the manipulation of the media and overwhelming application of corporate power, the "middle" you speak of has been artificially pushed way to the Right.

Just look at how a politician like Barack Obama is said to be "far Left", when in fact, he's to the Right of a real Center. I've lived long enough to have seen a real "Left" in America, and my father and grandfather have lived through a time when there was even a farther Left, with the Wobblies and the CPUSA. In fact, during my granddad's adulthood, Socialism was not very far from the mainstream in the US. I wonder what would happen if a real Leftist ever became a serious candidate for office here. I'd go so far as to say that not one single member of Congress could be honestly said to be on the "far Left" and that includes Rep Sanders (Ind-Vermont).

On the other hand, someone like John McCain, who is widely (and wrongly) thought to be a "Centrist" supports a torture regime, the elimination of habeas corpus, warrantless surveillance of US citizens, corporate control of media, the elimination of the Department of Education, the repeal of all banking and securities regulation, and many more positions that would normally earn a politician a reputation as a member of the Far Right, if not actually Fascism.

Seriously, let me list those again: John McCain supports torture, holding people, including US citizens indefinitely without bringing charges, warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and email conversations, unregulated corporate control of all media, the elimination of the Department of Education, the repeal of all banking and securities regulation, etc.

And interestingly, he was one of the politicians who used to push the privatization of Social Security, although he wouldn't whisper a word of that any more. Remember, if Social Security had been privatized during Bush's first term, which Bush wanted and McCain supported, there would have been a lot of Americans who had their Social Security funds at Bear Stearns, which recently went from over $100 per share to $2.00 per share. Those Americans would have lost almost every penny. This is why you don't hear any more cheerleading for the idea of privatization of Social Security from conservatives any more, even though they would still love to see it happen.

No, "Left and Right" aren't really useful terms any more, when the spectrum has really become "Right and Further Right".

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[Omestes]

Something is hard, so trying it isn't worthwhile?

I think the point is that it is impossible to define because it doesn't actually mean anything. Its an arbitrary label we can throw onto other people we don't like. Each word is packed full of idiotic stereotypes, and psychological fallacies.

Left = commie
Right = fascist.

We might not admit to these translations, but I think that they are the general image we get when either term is used. And I don't think any person, or political ideology, ever actually can fall into a pure left/right schema. Its almost as moronic as the "red" and "blue" state myth, which serves no purpose than to pigeon hole people for the derision of other people.

I find it very easy to hold views from the so-called left and right at the same time. Many of them are not as contradictory as this simplistic classification would grant.

Out of curiosity where would famous political philosophers fall in this? Is John Locke, and J.S. Mill a leftist, while Thomas Hobbs is a righty?

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[Mr. Slippery]

Yes neocons are leftists. They are not for the goals of smaller government, even though they pretend they are.

Left/right has nothing to do with bigger/smaller government. Anarchists are leftists and in favor of a smaller government. Members of the Libertarian party are rightists in favor of a smaller government.

We would do well to think of government as a vector, possessing both magnitude and direction. The force of government can push left or right (or through several other dimensions), and it can do so either gently or with great force. Advocating a smaller government is fine, but doesn't say anything about which way you want that government's force to be applied.

Re:Are all americans one dimensional

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Liberals don't destroy economies. Conservatives do.

Go back 100 years. The economy did better when Democrats controlled the White House than when Republicans did. Leave off the best and worst of both parties, same answer. So it isn't just the Great Depression.

I'll take the economic "destruction" of 1993-2000 that came along with a 38% top marginal income tax rate, which is still lower than the marginal tax rate for middle income people paying FICA and in the 25% tax bracket (25% + 1
For the past 28 years, conservative Republican policies have been "borrow and spend". Raise taxes on the lower and middle classes, and cut them on the wealthiest. Run up huge deficits. Hand China and India the power that comes with holding nearly a trillion dollars in US obligations.

Conservative fiscal policy, as practiced by Reagan, Bush, and Bush, are inherently unsustainable. That unsustainability is finally coming home to roost, with a plummeting dollar.

So what is liberal or conservative?

[MickLinux]

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.

Re:So what is liberal or conservative?

[jellomizer]

If it's stupid it's left-wing.

Re:So what is liberal or conservative?

[morgan_greywolf]

And how much difference does it make?

For example, [Ll]ibertarians don't tend to see politics in this light. They see things as "statist" or "non-statist". Any viewpoint favoring the rights of the individual over the power of State intervention is non-statist. To a [Ll]ibertarian left and right can both be wrong, as they may, and oftentimes DO, both represent a statist viewpoint.

Incentivising Registration?

[eldavojohn]

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?

Why is everything about "bias"?

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Re:Why is everything about "bias"?

[Trojan35]

I agree with your overall point, but there is a difference between lies and bias. Example:

Truth: Joe went to the store to buy milk.
Bias #1: Joe, once again being the dutiful husband, went to the store to get some milk.
Bias #2: Joe, once again leaving his wife home alone with the child, went to the store to get some milk.

See the difference?

Re:Why is everything about "bias"?

[drooling-dog]

Came here to say that, more or less.

The problem I have with the term "bias" is that it's going to apply to any source of news and information that attempts to present some context, background, and interpretation into its reportage. The stripped, "unbiased" news merely reports what this or that political figure says, without any clue about where they're really coming from. When the media tries to do this, they not only fail to paint an accurate picture of what's going on, they often outright mislead.

Motivations are important in politics. If the authors of the "Clean Air Act" are actually backed by polluter interests, or if the "Patriot Act" actually does nothing but strip us of rights and liberties that real patriots fought and gave their lives for, then that case needs to be made. I've had enough of news media that constantly give disingenuous and manipulative politicians the benefit of the doubt by merely transcribing what they say, or allowing them to put their labels on things unchallenged. They're little more than PR agencies then.

Re:Why is everything about "bias"?

[Lendrick]

Case in point:

skews.com has this article rated as "liberal" -- it looks to me like it's just the result of a (somewhat alarming) study on education. This article here appears to have been labeled "conservative" just because it came from Fox News.

Fake "Balance"

[Doc Ruby]

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?

So what in general is the media.

[jellomizer]

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.

How will you account for response bias?

[moderatorrater]

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?

Missing sliders

[Tsar]

From your site's What is Skewz? section:

Skewz was started by a group of 4 guys with diverse political views who engaged in frequent political sparring. We tired of the coarseness of the public political dialog and the tendency for both sides to talk past each other. The goal was not to make peace between liberals and conservatives. Instead, we wanted to encourage liberal-conservative dialogue by improving on the intelligence and thoughtfulness of the discussions. We hoped that doing so would take focus from the cosmetic appeal of parties and personalities that generate allegiances and place it instead on wit and wisdom of intelligent debate. It seems that your site's focus is currently on cultural/political bias rather than the "wit and wisdom of intelligent debate." If your project is to be true to its goals, shouldn't there be evaluation sliders for an article's wit, insight, wisdom and informativeness? We use a simplified system for that on Slashdot and it works surprisingly well most of the time.

Skewz me?

[Jeffrey Baker]

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?

Re:Skewz me?

[EMB Numbers]

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.

Re:Skewz me?

[uncadonna]

Reality has a liberal bias, that's all.

The One Party State

[copponex]

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?

Re:Bzzt wrong

[mrraven]

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:

"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 .02