[ThalesX]

I've built a local (for my country) news aggregator that basically clusters news and summarizes them based on multiple sources and gives me the rundown of the most important things, and things that can be found between conflicting sources. It's mostly a pet project for myself as it doesn't seem to have a lot of stickyness without the clickbait.

I gave the 'product' to friends and some of them told me "oh, you should do it like ground.news where I can see left, center, right". This idea turns me off so much. Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Just give me the information that's there in most sources and it's probably be going to be close to some objective overview of the situation.

[pixl97]

> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.

Because at the day information can be political.

>the information that's there in most sources

While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

[ThalesX]

> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.

>> Because at the day information can be political.

Umm. Yes. Which is precisely what placing it left / center / right amplifies.

> the information that's there in most sources

>> While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.

Sure, it's another bit of information. I think more important are the facts. Did this actually happen? If so, what happened? The tl;dr of what happened should give me a pretty good idea, without having to become a reporter myself, especially if covered by both sides.

I think this is more of an issue of an union, than the 'argument to moderation' or 'false balance' might appeal to. If I'm left, and report or something and you don't. That's probably high noise. If you're right and report to something I don't. That's probably high noise. If we both report on something, and we report differently on 80% but we have the same 20%. I'd say that 20% is high signal.

What if we cut out the left / center / right ideas and just take as many sources as we can? Then extract what's common between them. Wouldn't that have some sort of higher signal to noise ratio than any single viewpoint?

Of course, I'm willing to accept I'm wrong. From my personal experience so far, I'm much less inclined to extremes than I was since starting to use this system.

[chatmasta]

Ground.news also gives the information that is present in only one side, which is just as high signal – if not higher – as showing the overlap IMO. They have a feed for “stories with equal coverage” and “stories covered mostly in left-leaning sources” and “stories covered mostly in right-leaning sources.”

[ThalesX]

I'm seaching for 'equal' on the home page and finding no results, nor for 'feeds'. Could you help me identify those locations? It's always confusing to me when I go to their home page and would appreciate it. I think the equal coverage might be what I'm actually looking for.

[quickymonster]

I think you misunderstand the feature.

Ground news tells you the bias of publications that have published the news item not the slant of the news item itself. It lets you see how much news gets completely ignored by the right and left (the right is way worse) when it isn't favorable to their cause. It's also really interesting to sample both sides and see how wildly the facts get slanted as you get further from center.

The publishers are biased, not the news item.

[ThalesX]

I think I understand this feature pretty well. What I'm arguing for is taking the common information between all news sources (without having to place them in left / right / center) is much higher signal to noise.

Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste. It makes me feel dumb for even writing this reply. Alas, these are my thoughts. News should be news. What happened and when. Not some attack vector against a group of people or another.

[Spooky23]

A relative was a high level local political figure. His quip was always “if you want to know what’s important that is going on, look for what isn’t in the newspaper.”

Any issue I’m deeply familiar with that gets reported is almost always missing lots of meaningful information. There isn’t really competition for most news, so there’s no incentive to follow up.

Publishers have biases, and their sources have agendas.