How different news stories are presented by various news sources is rarely uniform. Different news outlets have different takes, or present different aspects of a story or highlight different facts about it, and this shapes what consumers of that news take away from the story.
Add the internet and social media algorithms and you wind up with what are referred to as "filter bubbles" where, depending on which news sources you pay attention to, different people develop fundamentally different understandings of the same events or stories. This is, in part, what’s driving our increasingly polarized society.
We learn about AllSides Technologies, a company that’s trying to mitigate this trend. Their team uses a variety of methods to estimate the perceived political bias of news outlets and then presents different versions of similar news stories from sources they’ve rated as being on the political right, left, or center, with a mission to show readers news outside their filter bubble and illustrate media bias.
They use a hands-on approach by balancing the input of experts and ordinary people across the political spectrum. And they use multiple methods and not an algorithm, including Blind Bias Surveys of Americans, Editorial Reviews by a politically balanced panel of experts trained to look for common types of media bias, independent reviews, and sometimes third party data from universities and researchers.
We talk with one of their team members to learn about the company, the process they use to determine the ratings, and about the way media bias as evolved.
Guest:
Julie Mastrine, Director of Marketing and Media Bias Ratings at All Sides
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