
Media Observatory – Quantifying Media Bias - ThouYS
http://mediaobservatory.com
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stareatgoats
This article teaches some useful things about the media landscape, like the
main players in the "wholesale" part of the news supply chain. Not sure how
deep the described service will be able to categorize and label bias in the
normal sense of the word, but it can nonetheless (possibly) prove to be a
highly useful tool for media meta analysis.

Will be following this.

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SiempreViernes
Is there a clear, and precise, definition of bias? "Systematic deviation from
the truth" sounds like a good start, but _truth_ isn't exactly something that
is easily available in practice.

Honestly, similarity measures seems like a good start to build a more robust
"bias" definition on, even if it won't be exactly the meaning I suggested
above.

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stareatgoats
> _" Systematic deviation from the truth" sounds like a good start_

"Truth" is such a vague notion bordering on unusable in most rational
contexts, as what most people consider "truth" contains some bias or other.
When people quarrel over truthfulness is seldom the facts that they disagree
on; it is the valuation of those facts in relation to the topic, i.e.
relevance.

Not counting the type of bias which is not ashamed to twist the actual facts,
but that is a rarity, and easily dismissed.

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SiempreViernes
> When people quarrel over truthfulness is seldom the facts that they disagree
> on

Eh, I think this now we are at a mostly semantic point: for example, there is
nothing strange about arguing there exists some optimal weighting of various
facts, and this optimal combination can then justifiably be labelled truth.

> Not counting the type of bias which is not ashamed to twist the actual
> facts, but that is a rarity, and easily dismissed.

Isolated instances are easily dismissed, but the USA is now ruled by a
systematic dismissal of truth so it is not quite so easy.

