Any experiences with AllSides for interpretation of news?
I recently discovered AllSides and I'm wondering if anyone here has experience with it. If not, surely many people here will be interested in it. Seems like an amazing resource, almost too good to be true.
A while back I tried cutting down all my news feeds to just Wikipedia current events, but that can lack the interpretation/commentary which is useful for understanding. I think this will help, as well as provide a quick and easy resource when you want to validate a headline.
Their description:
"AllSides strengthens our democracy with balanced news, diverse perspectives, and real conversation.
We expose people to information and ideas from all sides of the political spectrum so they can better understand the world — and each other. Our balanced news coverage, media bias ratings, civil dialogue opportunities, and technology platform are available for everyone and can be integrated by schools, nonprofits, media companies, and more."
I don't get the point? This seems to rate based on some arbitrary decisions about what constitutes "left" or "right" but doesn't apply any consideration for credibility, accuracy, journalistic probity, nothing. Those are all much more germane aspects of understanding what the truth of a matter is than trying to make sense out of what two opposing bullshit artists are saying.
Their media bias chart also makes no sense.
What kind of scale is it where you can't differentiate between MSNBC and Jacobin? On what planet is the NYTimes Opinion page, most recently famous for publishing Tom Cotton's "Let the Brownshirts In" OpEd without editorial review, also as far Left as Jacobin?
This is the problem with most "the truth is in the middle" types of arguments. The truth isn't in the middle. The truth is the truth and various people are trying to fumble towards it in the dark. If you want to find it, you do so by evaluating their analysis, their ability to identify substantiated facts from suppositions, and to parse what reasonable areas for disagreement or doubt are and use that context to figure out where you should be headed. You most definitely will not get to it by trying to average out the competing arguments of two groups who are not at all interested in the truth and only in making you believe them. You also will not get it by trying to average out competing arguments from one group that is interested and one group that is bullshitting. In fact, any bullshitting or any motivated reasoning is bad. Garbage in will lead to garbage out and that problem doesn't go away with scale.
Relevant:
Did you take any time to explore the site or is this a impulse reaction colored by your previous experiences? By no means is anyone arguing that "the truth is in the middle". The value here, that I'm recognizing, is in checking bias and in getting exposure from alternative perspectives, regardless if you think they are correct and especially for sources unfamiliar to you.
From their FAQ:
There are other sources to help with fact-checking, this is something else. More information is found in the sources below.
https://www.allsides.com/about
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-rating-methods
I mean obviously. I think you could have inferred that based on the fact that I found their bias chart and read its methodology. . .
The thing is, if you regularly read widely you will already know what the editorial slant of each publication is. You'll even get a sense for the personal biases and analytical strengths and weaknesses of individual bylines. I don't see the point in having a middleman who is doing, what is evidently, a sloppy job of tagging it.
But why? Why intentionally expose myself to more non-factual bullshit that I need to constantly do the work of checking? This is increasing my cognitive load, not lightening it. Would it not make more sense to rely on a handful of trustworthy, vetted sources that have good journalistic practice?
I'm all in favor of a omnivorous media diet...but I don't think this is the best way to do it.
Taking some headlines from the front page and looking at the sources they promote as left/right/center:
China Promises Retaliation to US Sanctions Over Uighur Internment Camps
uhhhh...I'm on the left. Qatar's state-run news outlet is in no way representative of my views.
And the New York Post is a tabloid.
These are 3 fundamentally different news outlets that can't be flattened into a "left/right/center" divide. I don't think pretending they are is a good way to increase media literacy.
Supreme Court Blocks Trump From Ending DACA
WSJ is absolutely not a centrist publication. And I'm not a huge fan of CNN (or any other 24 hour TV news channel) but saying they're "on the left" in the same way the Washington Examiner is "on the right" is disingenuous at best.
To me, the value of seeing "the other side" isn't to see a different political spin on the same facts. It's to learn new facts. I'm willing to deal with a certain amount of bias if you bring something new to the table, something that other sources simply aren't talking about. Even if I have to do the work of fact-checking it myself, at least you gave me a starting point to learn something genuinely new to me. A site that simply rounds up a bunch of different takes on the same publicly known facts (or worse, a complete denial of those facts) isn't going to expand my horizons.
That said, I'm not American and I don't need more American politics in my life. But the same would apply if somebody implemented the same idea closer to home.
I don’t have experience with allsides. I have however previously come across Knowhere news which seems pretty good:
https://knowherenews.com/