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Comment by harigov | Hacker News Reader

I am not interested in unbiased news sources. I am interested in showing alternately biased news source so that you can develop your own opinion. Even showing snippets of alternate views superposed on the same article can help people a bit.

My aim is not to solve the problem in its entirety. If others cannot understand our opinion, we should at least try to understand theirs. The current situation is horrible in terms of people not even having a clue as to what's going on. If 10% benefit from this, that means there are 10% of people who at least know both/many sides.

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Then you have the problem of giving equal weight to inequal ideas just because they happen to be in opposition. You see this a lot on debate shows where they have a climate scientist and a climate change denier, giving the appearance of debate within the scientific community (e.g.) when there is very little.

> it's hard to pull people away from their news sources to something unbiased. We need to take unbiased articles to the people.

> I am not interested in unbiased news sources.

So, which is it? I think the focus on bias vs unbiased news sources is a distraction. ALL news is biased. That is something that will never change.

> If others cannot understand our opinion

What if the issue here is that others understand your opinion perfectly, but still disagree with it? This whole conversation is starting to sound a lot like you want a tool that will magically make people agree with you.

Good catch regarding the biased/unbiased. Parent to that post pointed out that there is a news source that tries to show unbiased news. I was implying that we need to take such news sources to people, rather than expecting them to get to that on their own. As I mentioned elsewhere, the idea is not to show unbiased news but rather show other side of the news (in the bias spectrum). I am not entirely clear on what makes the most sense, which is why I posted it here.

I don't have any claims on people not agreeing with me. I have claims on me not understanding what's going on. I think if such a tool as I proposed existed, I would be happy to use it.

The best "tool" available is the No Agenda Podcast.

Hosts Adam and John present national and global issues as portrayed by mass media, and systematically DECONSTRUCT the stories. They not only highlight biases, but explore propagandistic elements and discuss how the media intentionally affects the consumers.

Most importantly, they work to identify the MOTIVATIONS for medias' biases in the first place, and demonstrate for their listeners how to be much more critical, skeptical, and analytical in the way they consume the news.

Listen to a few episodes and you might rethink the need for building a tool at all.

In all aspects, they would be brilliant, but what about spectrum of content coverage. What about readership?

But this dissemination of information by identifying biases of the entities involved is a tactic that can be used by anyone. Objective thinking belongs to everyone, doesn't it?

Hey this is an awesome idea!

Each side could vote for articles they think are biased or not biased.

Then you are shown the ones where there is the strongest disagreement between each side.

Another idea is to allow each sentence or paragraph to be evaluated on how biased it is. So someone could read through hovering over sentences and maybe pressing a keyboard shortcut to indicate whether they think this sentence is biased.

The goal is not to evaluate bias, but to find areas of contention and allow the debate/comments to hone in on a particular phrase/paragraph or something.

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