Sunday, August 24, 2008

Skewz


How unbiased is the news you are getting from the traditional media?

It has been over a decade since you could call the mainstream media "liberal" by any objective standard. Yet somehow the phrase "liberal media" is still ubiquitous among conservatives. Only in the last two years are the mainstream media beginning to notice that they are being attacked far more by the left than the right.

Michael Calderone at the right-wing leaning political site and Washington paper Politico blames the Internet. This is somewhat silly but he has a good overview.

What can you do about bias? There is a site I belong to called Skewz that asks readers to upload media article links and then its readers rate the degree of bias.



Asking readers to judge the bias of a story does run into its own problems. Some people do not rate the nuance of coverage but just the topic, even if the coverage of the topic is slanted. Some people have their own unique ways of rating - one person got very active adding articles all of which he rated far left or far right. Later he revealed that he thought that anything that supported America or had a conservative view of the consitution was absolutely right - "far right" - and those he thought didn't support America or traditional values or his conservative views was all wrong - "far left."

Still, an interesting site - Skewz and maybe a beginning of a way of dealing with bias in the news.

(You might call Skewz a Digg news site with an added feature of the bias rating of the links.)


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