How to Make up Your Own Mind About the News
This is the first in a series of posts about bluewhitered.org, a media analysis tool that aims to help put the news in perspective.
Have you ever had a political conversation with someone — either online or at the dinner table — and felt like you were talking past each other, using a completely different set of facts and understanding of the news? The combination of a polarized media landscape and algorithm-driven filter bubbles makes it hard to develop an objective opinion.
It can often feel like you’re not getting the whole picture, or being sold a story from a specific point of view. And that is because, increasingly, that is the case. A polarized media landscape is nothing new, but with ~55% of Americans getting their news on Facebook (close to the percentage of eligible Americans that typically vote), it has never been easier for algorithms to target specific populations with messaging designed to make them think — and eventually act — a certain way.
It’s really hard to escape the feedback loop of news consumption online. It takes time and effort to find the full array of news from outlets across the spectrum, and to understand the typical historical biases of each of those outlets. And in the lead up to the US Presidential election in November it is particularly, urgently important that we are all as objectively informed as possible.
That’s why I created bluewhitered.org (BWR): to provide a fuller, targeting-free picture — and let you make up your own mind about the world around you.
If you want to get a clearer picture of what everyone is reading — not just your own bubble — it’s for you.
Nothing on BWR is personalized — everyone sees the exact same thing. It shows every popular article being read from the furthest left to the farthest right, with as much data and unbiased context as possible. From a media tracking perspective, BWR also makes it really easy to see how different publishers frame the news and what is rising to the top across different partisan corners of the Red and Blue Web.
How it works
Every hour, BWR pulls in news stories that have more than 10,000 Likes on Facebook (our threshold for a story being “popular”) and based on their source, classifies them into Blues, Whites and Reds.
This data comes from a service called Webhose.io via their API. They have a crawler that scrapes data from thousands of news sites every day and tracks all kinds of useful metadata, including when it was published, how many Facebook likes it has and so on. BWR only asks for politically related news, but sometimes some other stuff sneaks in there too.
In order to classify the stories, BWR uses source ratings from AllSides.com and MediaBiasFactCheck.com, which are independently funded media rating organizations, not associated with major political parties or publication houses. (They have descriptions of their methodology and funding — check them out). In all, BWR has classifications for over 300 separate News sources representing every part of the political spectrum. Blue sources lean more to the US political Left, Red sources to the Right, and White sources are more to the Center.
On a large screen, BWR allows you to sort, filter and view those stories by when they were published, how popular they are and how “viral” they have become since publishing. Popularity is measured in Facebook likes accumulated since the story was published. “Virality” is defined as Facebook likes accumulated divided by the number of hours since the story was published — it is intended to be a measure of how fast the story became popular.
The News by Topic page consists of the same news articles and bias spectrum as on the main page, but organized by topic cluster, and ordered by virality of the topic. You can click on a topic and see all the articles associated with it from the time BWR started collecting content. The process of matching articles to topics is about 90% automated and 10% manual cleanup. Part of that 10% is the titling of each topic itself — though I’d like to automate this too in the future. It’s a particularly tricky task to title each topic with as neutral language as possible.
On any page you can tap on a story and read a preview of it, or read the whole thing on the original news site. I track traffic and click-through to see how people use the feature, but I take no affiliate fees of any kind from sites to which I drive traffic.
It’s important to note that BWR is strictly non-commercial. I fund the site myself, and receive no advertising dollars or any other kind of revenue from it. I want BWR to live by its mission — objectively providing a variety of perspectives, with no incentive to promote one over another.
BWR is a living product — I’m tweaking it constantly, in response to bugs I find and the (many) suggestions I get from our awesome early users. I maintain a list of the most commonly asked questions here, but if your query isn’t covered, or if you just have an idea or a suggestion, I’d love to hear from you.
Coming Up
This is the first in a series of posts about BWR — I’ll be writing more in the weeks to come on the following topics:
- On Both Sides: False Equivalences or Why Should I Care What They Say
- Opinions vs. News: Sorting Editorial and Opinion content from reporting
- An Asymmetric Landscape: The Different Shapes of Red and Blue News
- The Face Spectrum: Using AI and facial recognition to analyze imagery used across the political spectrum
- Sanity Check: Popularity thresholds & Facebook likes as a metric
- US vs. Them: Geographic focus on the US vs. broader international coverage
- Source Analysis: How are the sources that BWR uses distributed along factual content and popularity metrics?
- Lexicon: How is the wording used across the spectrum different by bias? Are there any specific words that popular articles in each category always include?
- The Unnamed in Headlines: Why are some people’s names used in a news headline and others aren’t?
If you’re interested in stuff like this, follow along and let me know what you’d like to hear more about.
I hope you find BWR useful, and I hope you use it to make up your own mind about the world around you.
