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Skewz.com Founder Vipul Vyas Answers Your Questions About Media Bias
You asked questions about Skewz.com on April 2nd and April 3rd. Here are your answers. This media bias stuff is tricky to deal with. Both Skewz and Microsoft's Blewz are trying, anyway. Skewz people say they want to jump into the conversation attached to this post, so if you have any follow-up questions please feel free to ask them.
1) Why is everything about "bias"? (Score:5, Insightful)
by MillionthMonkey
Shouldn't just "being full of [bleep]" 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.
Vipul Vyas:
First of all, we've enjoyed all the great feedback from the Slashdot community. You can't get a more intellectual and insightful set of observations from any other group. With regard to rating bias on more granular terms, I'll answer the question with two points:
First, it's the combination of various factors that leads people to perceive bias as you have said. All we've really done is distill those many factors down to an overall political bias - either liberal or conservative. People perceive an article to be biased one direction or the other because of a variety of factors which include: biased word selection, assumptions not supported by data, poor sourcing, open demonization, inaccuracy, omission of facts, and guilt by association as a few examples. All of these factors in some combination create the perception of either liberal or conservative bias because folks on one side perceive their side is not being fairly represented by virtue of these factors being present. So the overall bias is a distillation of all these factors.
Second, all of the above being said; we are planning functionality to support this more granular reasoning for identifying bias. This will likely be used by power users that really want to dig into the reasons for bias. We believe this will be interesting because it will enable us to be able to track news sources in terms of both bias and the reasons for bias such as inaccuracies. This should add a new dimension of insight.
2) Incentivising Registration? (Score:4, Interesting)
by eldavojohn (898314)
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?
Vipul Vyas:
Great question. I believe people really enjoy the Skewz forum in which they can blow the whistle on pieces purporting to be objective but are not and also push forward pieces that they advocate despite their bias. When we first started the site we were simply transferring our own daily behavior of sending around emails with articles and our reactions to them. Just being able to find a community to exchange ideas and interact with is a huge draw for people...sort of like Slashdot but for politics. Many people can get angry with what they read in the paper, but their only recourse is to send a letter to the editor and hope that it gets read or the remote possibility that it gets printed. With Skewz they can call out such issues instantly and get an immediate reaction from a community of people from both sides of the political landscape. The feedback loop is immediate.
To answer your question more direction, right now Skewz does have a user ranking system. Users are ranked in terms of their experience on the site (number of articles submitted or skewed, comments made, etc.). Users are ranked from rookie Congressmen all the way up to incumbent Senators to keep with the political theme. We also provide individual statistics with regard to user activity under the user's Skewz Me! profile. These all provide incentive from a pure personal accomplishment perspective.
A curious thing we've observed is that people both 1. reveal bias in the 'main stream or corporate media,' and 2. submit articles that they know are biased from say the blogosphere that support their position. So one of the biggest emerging reasons that people are active is to promote their perspective in an environment where they feel they might just reach the other side. I believe people honestly feel that they can reach the "other side" on our site simply by virtue of the format.
With regard to getting to 10,000 users, we're relying on the basics:
1) Great reviews from the Slashdot community (that's you guys),
2) Strong content from a politically involved community and an intuitive mechanism to attract both opinion readers and trend setters,
3) Strong ties with the blogosphere to create a mutually rewarding Skew mechanism through our widget program which is customized for political blogs in ways that more generic widgets for sites such as Digg are not, and
4) Good motivation or our current users to invite their friends - which we're seeing a lot of.
We are pleased with the results so far as we have a healthy number of people enjoying Skewz.
3) Missing sliders (Score:4, Insightful)
by Tsar (536185)
From your site's What is Skewz? [skewz.com] 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.
Vipul Vyas:
Fair point. I think if you look at the discussion we have on the site today, it's quite a bit less bombastic than what you see on partisan sites. We're seeing people come to Skewz for more sophisticated debate with people from the other side of the political spectrum. People use the backdrop of a specific story with asserted facts and that backdrop helps keep things from getting personal and also keeps the focus on the article and topic being discussed. I believe that has really helped keep the community culture very positive.
But to your point, as indicated in my response to the first question here Skewz is adding functionality to allow people to more discretely comment on the positive and negative elements of the submitted articles.
4) Skewz me? (Score:4, Informative)
by Jeffrey Baker (6191)
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?
Vipul Vyas:
I think your observation makes the point. What many perceive as "straight up" objective can still be perceived as biased. With the article in question and the rating, I just learned something about how some segments of our polity interpret events...and it's very different from the way I interpret them. I think that's the point of Skewz.
Ultimately we'd have to ask the members of the Skewz community as to why the article was skewed left. I believe this is the insight you get from a site like Skewz. If you look at some of the comments associated with the article you see some interesting and even surprising perspectives which I never would have thoughts of.
Folks on the left felt the article was objective to slightly leftward leaning by pointing out the serious problems faced by inner city youth. So, liberals felt that the story being covered was good coverage of objective reality with maybe some modest left bias in terms of advocacy for a traditional set of liberal positions like uplifting those in inner cities and focusing more on education.
Conservatives had a more visceral response. If you look at the comments, the perception was that the failings were implicitly pointing to George Bush's No Child Left Behind policies. Some said the article didn't associate blame with the students or parents. Others pointed to the photo associated with the article showing jubilant African American students. They felt that the picture was out of line with the point that graduation rates among minorities were extremely low.
These sharply different take-aways from a fairly straight forward articles create the most insights. Skewz lets you augment those insights by seeing who skewed the article in what way. Each person's profile provides their political orientation so you can see how liberals reacted to an article and how conservatives reacted. That makes for some interesting insights. In addition, you can leverage the split view function on Skewz to see a story about the same news event that is rated with the opposite political orientation to the one that you are currently reading. That really lets you flesh out the whole picture in terms of the world of opinion.
5) Complaints? (Score:2, Interesting)
by Notquitecajun (1073646)
Have you ever gotten complaints from actual journalists about how their stories are rated? I think one thing that we rarely - if ever - hear is how actual journalists rate the news. I'm not talking pundits, either, I'm talking about those who are supposed to report on the who-what-when-where-how of the news.
Vipul Vyas:
We haven't so far but we hope to become more influential and at that point we'll matter to journalists. Unfortunately, some journalists are not too worried about what their readership thinks. That's where the Slashdot community can help by posting and skewing articles to keep the media honest. Our blog widget program will enable political bloggers to let their readers rate their articles and post them on Skewz. Now, bloggers by their nature are biased advocates of certain positions. That being said, there is value in understanding the information these blogs present relative to the traditional media. The closer the traditional media gets to certain segments of the blogosphere, the less likely they are representing an objective perspective. The blogs, on the other hand, carry their liberal and conservative affiliations as a badge of honor.
6) Hmm, the Microsoft attempt looks more sophisticated (Score:3, Insightful)
by melted (227442)
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.
Vipul Vyas:
There's always the risk that one side dominates the site. That being said, there is such a perception of media bias on both sides that I believe Skewz provides a legitimate venue for that discussion to take place which will continue to draw people from both ends of the political spectrum. If we provide an even playing field, we'll be a place where either side can come to try to evangelize the other in terms of their perceptions. Skewz is an political open space.
Also, based on a recent Harris Interactive Poll Blog readership is almost evenly distributed with 22 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats regularly reading blogs. Independents are the ones slightly more likely to read these, as just over one-quarter (26%) say they regularly read political blogs.
Interestingly, most all of the founders of Skewz come have speech recognition and statistical language modeling background. We leverage language modeling in our split view function which matches stories on the right with their corresponding foils on the left to provide a fuller perspective. So from that perspective we do use some linguistic modeling at a basic level.
I applaud what Microsoft is doing with Blews. However, I think Skewz is a pretty different site in that it's user driven, and we're interested in understanding what people think. If you're really into the political blog world you realize that different blogs have different degrees of alignment with the left or right and this actually evolves. In fact, some folks completely swap sides over time. In the end politics is about people and their perceptions. We think its valuable to get it directly from the source to best understand how these trends evolve. For example, Andrew Sullivan has evolved from being a fairly right wing stalwart to being an Obama supporter. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs moved in the other direction after 9/11. These movements are best described by asking the polity itself.
7) Cultural polarization as a web service (Score:2)
by Tsar (536185)
What filters will be available in the future? Will users be able to limit the stories they see to those rated, say, (+4,Reactionary) or above? That would allow your portal to emulate the Drudge Report, the Daily Kos or the John Birch Society homepage at the user's whim, removing the risk of accidental exposure to differing viewpoints.
Vipul Vyas:
I'm glad you asked this question. Skewz actually has this functionality today. If you are a registered user you'll see a spectrum under both the liberal and conservative sides. You can slide the hands there to bracket the stories to see more or less extremes of each side. In this way, you can create your own view or synthetic version of the Drudge Report or Daily Kos. But keep in mind, by virtue of the format you are always at risk at being exposed to the other side...which is a risk that has many rewards.
8) Where is your value add, without a better spectrum... (Score:2)
by PotatoHead (12771)
Of political alignment?
IMHO, most media today leans corporate left and corporate right. This is missed because the one dimensional model is not up to the task of actually helping us quantify and deal with bias.
So, why bother with a service like yours, if it is lacking in this way?
Vipul Vyas:
Good question. When Skewz first started, I used to just visit a couple of sites that were more or less aligned with my existing political beliefs. However, Skewz has exposed me to a variety of different perspectives...some of which I didn't even know existed. Even if I don't agree with some of the new perspectives I've been exposed to, I now have a better sense of how other people think and what their logic is. In some respects, I didn't realize what I myself was reading was biased because I was completely unaware of other facts or theories on the same subject that were out there. Skewz has enabled me to still get a lot of the information I was getting before while at the same time exposing me to an entirely different world of thinking in a format that's relatively easy to use.
With regard to your question on the spectrum, it works because you're not just rating the corporate media left or right which I take it you mean the traditional media. Blogs are also well represented on the site. Users can submit and add weight to what the blogs are saying. If there are subjects or angles that the traditional media are not covering then these stories can be submitted and rated. Again, people tend to reveal bias in two ways: 1. I know this is biased, but I like what it is saying or 2. this purports to be objective and it's not so I am blowing the whistle. Some people also use the site to employ a third tactic. They submit articles as being objective that deal with subject or facts that they feel the media has not covered through "bias by exclusion."
9) Truth, and the real bias we need to worry about (Score:2)
by Gat0r30y (957941)
It seems that the news media has become increasingly segmented, and indeed this provides a way for people to get only the news they want to see. But my issue stems not from Left or Right, but from a more general perspective. An increasing bulk of the news out there is increasingly aimed at the Lowest Common Denominator. I can see that there is a place for tabloids, and their stories, just like there is a place for soap operas. However, it seems that the tabloid mentality has infiltrated all facets of corporate news media. Instead of raising debate about policy, the dialog in most mainstream news outlets has become more along the lines of "OMG, Hillary is 2 points down! And she doesn't have as many myspace friends as Obama! And McCain is super hot!". I propose that what we need is not a "Left vs. Right" filter, but a "Pointless drivel I wouldn't read if it was printed on Lindsay Lohan's ass and I was doin her from behind vs. Actual News Content which I might find of Value".
I gave your site a quick look, there were 3 stories on the front page which might have entailed some sort of policy issue, or problem facing the electorate.
A) UK considering "Health Vouchers" for NHS patients.(marked conservative)
B)Study: only 1/2 of students graduate high school in US Cities (marked liberal)
C)'Silent' Famine sweeps globe (marked liberal)
Everything else was the "high school lunchroom" type of discussion, who's up, who's down, why they might be up if they are up, why they shouldn't give up and "rah rah sis boom bah for My Favorite Candidate". My question is this, how can we elevate actual issues to the discussion? How can we start a dialog based on the problems we face, and the policy which the candidates propose to fix these problems? Food shortages, Education, and Health care are real issues. The day to day of campaigning is interesting for sure, but how can we keep it from dominating the news landscape as it does now?
Vipul Vyas:
This is a great question. I believe it's human nature to do both. The "name calling level of debate" is indeed easy and appealing. But that being said, if you look at the actual debate on Skewz; the level of debate is more solution oriented than you'll see on many other more partisan sites. In fact, the three substantial articles you mention may not show up anywhere on many other news outlets. You are right in that news outlets tend to cater to the segments they are going after. With Skewz, the community decides what is most interesting so the feedback loop is more immediate. By and large, the self-selecting community has been more about deep debate on real issues versus mudslinging- even in this election season. On Skewz you can find finely parsed debate on Obama's health care plan or global warming for example.
Often the submitted article is the launching point for more detailed discussion where folks often learn a great deal about the other side. For example, liberal and conservatives (generally) seem to agree on US presence in Afghanistan...much to the surprise of many conservatives. Conversely, gun control is not as passionately pursued by liberals (at least those on our site currently) as many conservatives had assumed.
News media give their customer base what they want. With Skewz, the community decides what it wants, and so far we seem to be selecting a more sophisticated news consumer.
10) What about consensus? (Score:3, Funny)
by prxp (1023979)
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?)
Vipul Vyas:
We accommodate for this through the center skew which points to an objective view that everyone agrees represents reality objectively. Sadly, that doesn't happen often enough. (and by the way the quantum version of Skewz where articles can be liberal and conservative at the same time is coming up and will be part of the theory of everything...:-)
by MillionthMonkey
Shouldn't just "being full of [bleep]" 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.
Vipul Vyas:
First of all, we've enjoyed all the great feedback from the Slashdot community. You can't get a more intellectual and insightful set of observations from any other group. With regard to rating bias on more granular terms, I'll answer the question with two points:
First, it's the combination of various factors that leads people to perceive bias as you have said. All we've really done is distill those many factors down to an overall political bias - either liberal or conservative. People perceive an article to be biased one direction or the other because of a variety of factors which include: biased word selection, assumptions not supported by data, poor sourcing, open demonization, inaccuracy, omission of facts, and guilt by association as a few examples. All of these factors in some combination create the perception of either liberal or conservative bias because folks on one side perceive their side is not being fairly represented by virtue of these factors being present. So the overall bias is a distillation of all these factors.
Second, all of the above being said; we are planning functionality to support this more granular reasoning for identifying bias. This will likely be used by power users that really want to dig into the reasons for bias. We believe this will be interesting because it will enable us to be able to track news sources in terms of both bias and the reasons for bias such as inaccuracies. This should add a new dimension of insight.
2) Incentivising Registration? (Score:4, Interesting)
by eldavojohn (898314)
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?
Vipul Vyas:
Great question. I believe people really enjoy the Skewz forum in which they can blow the whistle on pieces purporting to be objective but are not and also push forward pieces that they advocate despite their bias. When we first started the site we were simply transferring our own daily behavior of sending around emails with articles and our reactions to them. Just being able to find a community to exchange ideas and interact with is a huge draw for people...sort of like Slashdot but for politics. Many people can get angry with what they read in the paper, but their only recourse is to send a letter to the editor and hope that it gets read or the remote possibility that it gets printed. With Skewz they can call out such issues instantly and get an immediate reaction from a community of people from both sides of the political landscape. The feedback loop is immediate.
To answer your question more direction, right now Skewz does have a user ranking system. Users are ranked in terms of their experience on the site (number of articles submitted or skewed, comments made, etc.). Users are ranked from rookie Congressmen all the way up to incumbent Senators to keep with the political theme. We also provide individual statistics with regard to user activity under the user's Skewz Me! profile. These all provide incentive from a pure personal accomplishment perspective.
A curious thing we've observed is that people both 1. reveal bias in the 'main stream or corporate media,' and 2. submit articles that they know are biased from say the blogosphere that support their position. So one of the biggest emerging reasons that people are active is to promote their perspective in an environment where they feel they might just reach the other side. I believe people honestly feel that they can reach the "other side" on our site simply by virtue of the format.
With regard to getting to 10,000 users, we're relying on the basics:
1) Great reviews from the Slashdot community (that's you guys),
2) Strong content from a politically involved community and an intuitive mechanism to attract both opinion readers and trend setters,
3) Strong ties with the blogosphere to create a mutually rewarding Skew mechanism through our widget program which is customized for political blogs in ways that more generic widgets for sites such as Digg are not, and
4) Good motivation or our current users to invite their friends - which we're seeing a lot of.
We are pleased with the results so far as we have a healthy number of people enjoying Skewz.
3) Missing sliders (Score:4, Insightful)
by Tsar (536185)
From your site's What is Skewz? [skewz.com] 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.
Vipul Vyas:
Fair point. I think if you look at the discussion we have on the site today, it's quite a bit less bombastic than what you see on partisan sites. We're seeing people come to Skewz for more sophisticated debate with people from the other side of the political spectrum. People use the backdrop of a specific story with asserted facts and that backdrop helps keep things from getting personal and also keeps the focus on the article and topic being discussed. I believe that has really helped keep the community culture very positive.
But to your point, as indicated in my response to the first question here Skewz is adding functionality to allow people to more discretely comment on the positive and negative elements of the submitted articles.
4) Skewz me? (Score:4, Informative)
by Jeffrey Baker (6191)
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?
Vipul Vyas:
I think your observation makes the point. What many perceive as "straight up" objective can still be perceived as biased. With the article in question and the rating, I just learned something about how some segments of our polity interpret events...and it's very different from the way I interpret them. I think that's the point of Skewz.
Ultimately we'd have to ask the members of the Skewz community as to why the article was skewed left. I believe this is the insight you get from a site like Skewz. If you look at some of the comments associated with the article you see some interesting and even surprising perspectives which I never would have thoughts of.
Folks on the left felt the article was objective to slightly leftward leaning by pointing out the serious problems faced by inner city youth. So, liberals felt that the story being covered was good coverage of objective reality with maybe some modest left bias in terms of advocacy for a traditional set of liberal positions like uplifting those in inner cities and focusing more on education.
Conservatives had a more visceral response. If you look at the comments, the perception was that the failings were implicitly pointing to George Bush's No Child Left Behind policies. Some said the article didn't associate blame with the students or parents. Others pointed to the photo associated with the article showing jubilant African American students. They felt that the picture was out of line with the point that graduation rates among minorities were extremely low.
These sharply different take-aways from a fairly straight forward articles create the most insights. Skewz lets you augment those insights by seeing who skewed the article in what way. Each person's profile provides their political orientation so you can see how liberals reacted to an article and how conservatives reacted. That makes for some interesting insights. In addition, you can leverage the split view function on Skewz to see a story about the same news event that is rated with the opposite political orientation to the one that you are currently reading. That really lets you flesh out the whole picture in terms of the world of opinion.
5) Complaints? (Score:2, Interesting)
by Notquitecajun (1073646)
Have you ever gotten complaints from actual journalists about how their stories are rated? I think one thing that we rarely - if ever - hear is how actual journalists rate the news. I'm not talking pundits, either, I'm talking about those who are supposed to report on the who-what-when-where-how of the news.
Vipul Vyas:
We haven't so far but we hope to become more influential and at that point we'll matter to journalists. Unfortunately, some journalists are not too worried about what their readership thinks. That's where the Slashdot community can help by posting and skewing articles to keep the media honest. Our blog widget program will enable political bloggers to let their readers rate their articles and post them on Skewz. Now, bloggers by their nature are biased advocates of certain positions. That being said, there is value in understanding the information these blogs present relative to the traditional media. The closer the traditional media gets to certain segments of the blogosphere, the less likely they are representing an objective perspective. The blogs, on the other hand, carry their liberal and conservative affiliations as a badge of honor.
6) Hmm, the Microsoft attempt looks more sophisticated (Score:3, Insightful)
by melted (227442)
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.
Vipul Vyas:
There's always the risk that one side dominates the site. That being said, there is such a perception of media bias on both sides that I believe Skewz provides a legitimate venue for that discussion to take place which will continue to draw people from both ends of the political spectrum. If we provide an even playing field, we'll be a place where either side can come to try to evangelize the other in terms of their perceptions. Skewz is an political open space.
Also, based on a recent Harris Interactive Poll Blog readership is almost evenly distributed with 22 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats regularly reading blogs. Independents are the ones slightly more likely to read these, as just over one-quarter (26%) say they regularly read political blogs.
Interestingly, most all of the founders of Skewz come have speech recognition and statistical language modeling background. We leverage language modeling in our split view function which matches stories on the right with their corresponding foils on the left to provide a fuller perspective. So from that perspective we do use some linguistic modeling at a basic level.
I applaud what Microsoft is doing with Blews. However, I think Skewz is a pretty different site in that it's user driven, and we're interested in understanding what people think. If you're really into the political blog world you realize that different blogs have different degrees of alignment with the left or right and this actually evolves. In fact, some folks completely swap sides over time. In the end politics is about people and their perceptions. We think its valuable to get it directly from the source to best understand how these trends evolve. For example, Andrew Sullivan has evolved from being a fairly right wing stalwart to being an Obama supporter. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs moved in the other direction after 9/11. These movements are best described by asking the polity itself.
7) Cultural polarization as a web service (Score:2)
by Tsar (536185)
What filters will be available in the future? Will users be able to limit the stories they see to those rated, say, (+4,Reactionary) or above? That would allow your portal to emulate the Drudge Report, the Daily Kos or the John Birch Society homepage at the user's whim, removing the risk of accidental exposure to differing viewpoints.
Vipul Vyas:
I'm glad you asked this question. Skewz actually has this functionality today. If you are a registered user you'll see a spectrum under both the liberal and conservative sides. You can slide the hands there to bracket the stories to see more or less extremes of each side. In this way, you can create your own view or synthetic version of the Drudge Report or Daily Kos. But keep in mind, by virtue of the format you are always at risk at being exposed to the other side...which is a risk that has many rewards.
8) Where is your value add, without a better spectrum... (Score:2)
by PotatoHead (12771)
Of political alignment?
IMHO, most media today leans corporate left and corporate right. This is missed because the one dimensional model is not up to the task of actually helping us quantify and deal with bias.
So, why bother with a service like yours, if it is lacking in this way?
Vipul Vyas:
Good question. When Skewz first started, I used to just visit a couple of sites that were more or less aligned with my existing political beliefs. However, Skewz has exposed me to a variety of different perspectives...some of which I didn't even know existed. Even if I don't agree with some of the new perspectives I've been exposed to, I now have a better sense of how other people think and what their logic is. In some respects, I didn't realize what I myself was reading was biased because I was completely unaware of other facts or theories on the same subject that were out there. Skewz has enabled me to still get a lot of the information I was getting before while at the same time exposing me to an entirely different world of thinking in a format that's relatively easy to use.
With regard to your question on the spectrum, it works because you're not just rating the corporate media left or right which I take it you mean the traditional media. Blogs are also well represented on the site. Users can submit and add weight to what the blogs are saying. If there are subjects or angles that the traditional media are not covering then these stories can be submitted and rated. Again, people tend to reveal bias in two ways: 1. I know this is biased, but I like what it is saying or 2. this purports to be objective and it's not so I am blowing the whistle. Some people also use the site to employ a third tactic. They submit articles as being objective that deal with subject or facts that they feel the media has not covered through "bias by exclusion."
9) Truth, and the real bias we need to worry about (Score:2)
by Gat0r30y (957941)
It seems that the news media has become increasingly segmented, and indeed this provides a way for people to get only the news they want to see. But my issue stems not from Left or Right, but from a more general perspective. An increasing bulk of the news out there is increasingly aimed at the Lowest Common Denominator. I can see that there is a place for tabloids, and their stories, just like there is a place for soap operas. However, it seems that the tabloid mentality has infiltrated all facets of corporate news media. Instead of raising debate about policy, the dialog in most mainstream news outlets has become more along the lines of "OMG, Hillary is 2 points down! And she doesn't have as many myspace friends as Obama! And McCain is super hot!". I propose that what we need is not a "Left vs. Right" filter, but a "Pointless drivel I wouldn't read if it was printed on Lindsay Lohan's ass and I was doin her from behind vs. Actual News Content which I might find of Value".
I gave your site a quick look, there were 3 stories on the front page which might have entailed some sort of policy issue, or problem facing the electorate.
A) UK considering "Health Vouchers" for NHS patients.(marked conservative)
B)Study: only 1/2 of students graduate high school in US Cities (marked liberal)
C)'Silent' Famine sweeps globe (marked liberal)
Everything else was the "high school lunchroom" type of discussion, who's up, who's down, why they might be up if they are up, why they shouldn't give up and "rah rah sis boom bah for My Favorite Candidate". My question is this, how can we elevate actual issues to the discussion? How can we start a dialog based on the problems we face, and the policy which the candidates propose to fix these problems? Food shortages, Education, and Health care are real issues. The day to day of campaigning is interesting for sure, but how can we keep it from dominating the news landscape as it does now?
Vipul Vyas:
This is a great question. I believe it's human nature to do both. The "name calling level of debate" is indeed easy and appealing. But that being said, if you look at the actual debate on Skewz; the level of debate is more solution oriented than you'll see on many other more partisan sites. In fact, the three substantial articles you mention may not show up anywhere on many other news outlets. You are right in that news outlets tend to cater to the segments they are going after. With Skewz, the community decides what is most interesting so the feedback loop is more immediate. By and large, the self-selecting community has been more about deep debate on real issues versus mudslinging- even in this election season. On Skewz you can find finely parsed debate on Obama's health care plan or global warming for example.
Often the submitted article is the launching point for more detailed discussion where folks often learn a great deal about the other side. For example, liberal and conservatives (generally) seem to agree on US presence in Afghanistan...much to the surprise of many conservatives. Conversely, gun control is not as passionately pursued by liberals (at least those on our site currently) as many conservatives had assumed.
News media give their customer base what they want. With Skewz, the community decides what it wants, and so far we seem to be selecting a more sophisticated news consumer.
10) What about consensus? (Score:3, Funny)
by prxp (1023979)
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?)
Vipul Vyas:
We accommodate for this through the center skew which points to an objective view that everyone agrees represents reality objectively. Sadly, that doesn't happen often enough. (and by the way the quantum version of Skewz where articles can be liberal and conservative at the same time is coming up and will be part of the theory of everything...:-)
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