Hacker News Reader

Comment by AiaAidan | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has worked in the media industry, I can tell you that the problem with unbiased news goes much deeper than simply presenting facts objectively. The very first step mentioned in your breakdown - scraping the latest headlines from publicly available news sites - is inherently biased, because it relies on a small selection of sources to determine what is considered newsworthy. But by whom? In reality, editors play a crucial role in shaping the news by deciding which events to cover and which to ignore, based on their own biases and interests.

From my own experience, I can tell you that the most important news stories are often the ones that go unreported/underreported by most news sites. Unfortunately, there are also many insidious methods used to shape public opinion, such as distraction etc. But it all starts with the decisions made by editors about WHAT YOU, as a reader, should SEE and CARE about. So if we truly want to achieve unbiased news, we need to start by reevaluating the very definition of what is news.

View on HN

I find the closest to an unbiased news source is Reuters.

I removed all other news apps from my phone and only leave the Reuters news app installed. [1]

I never read the news anymore.

The combination of the uncurated deluge of articles about stuff I don't know anything about (and realize I am not going to ever really know anything about) and them not really poking my buttons with editorialized headlines makes me just ignore it and come here more often instead.

Edit: I fathom its because the Reuters business model is fundamentally different - they are just trying to supply as many articles for use as raw base material factoids to all types of media organizations who can then add their own "secret sauce/value" by curating which articles their audience "sees" and handle the "interpretation" of the factoids (i.e. insert the editorial opinion with headlines, quips for their audiences will appreciate). That said - I do recall reading about some instances that Reuters is not perfect (article rushed to press and not entirely factually correct).

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reuters-news/id602660809

> I find the closest to an unbiased news source is Reuters.

Maybe for American news it is unbiased across conservatives / liberals, however from a non-American point of view Reuters is very VERY much biased towards US / CIA (even though it is incorporated in England).

What makes you say that it is very much biased?

Reuters isn't so much a source of news, it's a (top level) news aggregator. A source would be an experiencer telling their story about the events considered new, i.e. unexpected. News are updates of our collective model of the world.

Human communication has the aspects of content, sentiment and style. People look at style first, as they take it as an indicator for the social standing of the speaker. Sentiment is a close second, as it tells you about the attitude that speaker has towards the reported events. Content lastly is just the events themselves as they (reportedly) happened.

People find that content part hard to follow on its own, mostly because they usually don't really know the context anyway. Focusing on it as supposedly important "unbiased" "true" news is a gross misunderstanding.

Like yourself, people generally have a very incomplete idea of the world they live in. Like you, they don't seem to take much interest in it, as they view it as "not relevant to their lives". That is an absurd statement to make, if one has no clue about that part of the world to begin with, like you observed.

Recently declassified documents that they used to run propaganda for the British government in the 70s:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-media-idUSKBN1ZC2...

Makes you wonder what the as yet to be declassified top secret documents say.

> “ In 1969, Reuters needed money to further expand in the Middle East and Western powers such as Britain wanted to bolster their influence against the Soviet Union by expanding news services across the world, the documents showed.

The secret government financing of Reuters - as set out in the documents - amounted to 245,000 pounds ($317,838 at current exchange rates) per year before 1969 but then reduced to 100,000 pounds per year in 1969-1970 and nothing in 1972-1973.”

I don’t grasp what the article’s writer meant by “current exchange rates” and “before 1969” here, but in any event it sounds like only a few million real constant 2023 dollar equivalents, total, were involved, which is less like a secret think tank and more like travel and bureau support, which is basically what is being admitted to.

There is no such thing as unbiased news.

Anyone claiming to be unbiased, rather than wearing their biases on their sleeves, is lying to you, or themselves, or they are just ignorant.

Likely some combination of all three.

Selection bias is insidious, and impossible to rid.

By definition, news is things that are newsworthy. I.e. the most common things to tech receive coverage are the uncommon to things.

If four people get shot over the weekend in Riverdale, not news. If four people get shot over the weekend in Beverly Hills, news.

You don't even have to try to bias news for it be biased. (Now imagine if you try.)

Unless you live in Riverdale.

Underreporting on violence in certain communities vs others is biased. Who determines what is uncommon vs common? Who decides the value of 4 people in Riverdale vs 4 people in Beverly Hills? Just going by “frequency of shootings” is a form of bias.

"Unbiased" is like absolute zero. You never actually get there, but don't think there is no distinction between putting in an effort to make something decently cold, and hurling it into the sun.

It is not.

We can get within a few fractions of a percent of absolute zero but we can't sensibly agree on what "unbiased" even looks like.

Imagine, you had some tool affording you complete information about everything happening on earth, aided by some AI that only tells the truth about anything when asked.

You would still have to pose the right questions or risk dying in ignorance.

People's complaints here about bias is really about being manipulated successfully by parts of society working actively in their own, markedly different, interests.

Those won't just go away. Aligning interests doesn't happen by providing facts.

Very good point.

I realise now that my messaging with this project is off.

What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news.

In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the excessive positive/negative language.

Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.

If I understand correctly, you want to help people get an objective baseline of information about the world, they then can compare their individual bias against. Only thing is, I don't think most people care about that.

Humans provide their sentiment about developments to further their individual interests. Other people want to be informed about those motivations. Taking that away makes news subjectively meaningless for most.

There is a minority of truth-seekers who essentially individually engage in OSINT activity (if only by consuming more than one source).

An AI "doing the thinking for them" isn't the right way though (trust is an issue, remember). You want to teach people, how to be an intelligence analyst and give them the tools to avoid the drudgery.

Isn’t the aspiration to be unbiased worthy already?

The goal or call it “aspiration” to serve unbiased news is admirable to me, even while my rational mind knows the aspiration is an unattainable ideal. I will give them a try. Then I can judge their sincerity and performance relative to their aspiration.

Edit: added “judge”

How can you judge the relative distance from a fiction?

Who defines what is “unbiased”? What are their biases?

You cannot measure something that exists in a fiction that resides independently in each person’s mind.

Objective reality exists, but objective observers do not.

So you don't Believe In Science, friend? ;)

Objective observation is really hard, but amenable to systems and rules that help get closer to this ideal. I'm convinced it's possible to do far better than existing news organisations do just through approaching it with an engineering mindset.

That's something I've realised after reading these comments - that the goal of the project isn't to be 100% unbiased.

To be even 90% unbiased is 90% better than a sensationalist source.

I'm sure we can get very close to 100% as LLMs progress and if more talented people contribute to the project.

I do believe in science, I think perhaps you have a very biased, or at least limited, view of what “believing in science” means.

There is no way to judge whether or not you are close to some objective view of “unbiased news”. So it is not a worthwhile pursuit.

As others have noted, what is “newsworthy” is an entirely subjective prioritization of events and information. Are four deaths in Riverside news? Are four deaths in Palm Springs? Are both? Are neither? It depends on your subjective priorities, as a consumer, and no single news organization is ever going to achieve universal, subjective, but somehow unbiased news prioritization.

Labeling anyone person or group’s prioritization of information as “truth” is a dubious endeavor. Dubious to the point of being laughable.

It sounds to me like you want to rely on quantifiable science in all things. Yes science is founded upon math which is founded upon logic. Both math and logic are axiomatic systems, and axioms are assumed or declared. They are not independent of a person's mind either. You cannot escape it. David Hume sorted it out for us long ago. Rational certainty is a pipe dream. But that need not prevent us from navigating this world and enjoying life.

Back to the topic: we seem to be talking about a human being choosing between competing news sources. As that consumer, you get to define "unbiased" for yourself. Wise people have given it a lot of thought, so you might consider consulting what they said.

And you can draw the line at something being measurable to matter to you. That's your choice. I have found the things that matter most are fictions in my brain: love comes to mind.

It is also not necessary to measure to detect a distance. I love my dog, and I love my child. I cannot measure love, yet I detect a significant distance between my love for my dog and my love for my child.

Like love, "bias" has meaning even if it cannot be measured. Like love, one can detect distances between biases, even if they cannot be measured. Science (measurement), math (quantity), and logic (relations of ideas) are just as ephemeral, because they are founded upon unprovable axioms and norms.

Thank you.

I'd love to hear your thoughts after giving the site a try (please use the contact page on the website).

It is by no means perfect right now, but the goal is to get as close to perfect as possible.

Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral right now, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.

This is why I prefer to read openly bias sources.

If you read sources bias in both directions, you at least know the truth is probably somewhere within that range.

Granted that range can be quite large at times.

I realise now that my messaging with this project is off.

What would more accurately explain the purpose of this project is to reduce the effects of sensationalism and indoctrination in the news.

In other words, provide a platform for readers to make up their own opinions on news stories by filtering out the positive/negative language.

Even if NewsNotFound articles are only 90% neutral, that's 90% BETTER than reading the same story from a sensationalist source.

I wonder if this is true in reality. Isn’t it possible and maybe even likely that a non-neutral party is providing the most accurate version of the story? For example, a person or reporter living in a war zone, experiencing the actual war is likely biased in some fashion, but their recollections of what is actually happening is quite accurate compared to a “neutral” journalist sitting in their comfortable office in New York City, referring to various anonymous sources and reports from multiple perspectives.

Also, filtering out the positive and negative language might hide the bias of the article, making it seem more authoritative and believable. Many times when I read an article, and I see the journalist making conclusions with bombastic and unbalanced language, it is helpful information toward allowing me to detect bullshit and avoid that source.

Let's start by categorizing the information:

1. Information that immediately affects me

2. Information that might affect me

3. Information that doesn't affect me but I still care to know

4. Information that won't affect me

5. Information that won't affect me and I don't care to know

6. Information I don't care to know even if it affects me

Surely there must be a way to monetize information delivery. I would pay for an editorial-less stream of information that is relevant to me, and that isn't that I still want to know.

I used to think that unbiased news is an intractable problem purely based on information theory: to have an unbiased picture of the world, you need to have all the facts, which is physically impossible; and any layer that simplifies those facts (be it a journalist or an LLM) will add bias (either by journalist, journalist’s employer, LLM’s training data or operator preferences, and so on). In short, when your selection of facts to report is already biased, there’s not much you can do. In even shorter, map is not the territory (and all you have is a map).

However, I realized that’s not really true.

I mean, of course you cannot have unbiased news, and reevaluating the definition of “news” is not going to help you.

It’s just that there is actually a very good mechanism for combatting this—and it’s called “be aware of your bias and upfront about it”. There is any other way around it.

Unbiased news algorithm:

1. Identify all clusters of power and opinion, eg. Republicans, Democrats, Chinese Communist Party, UK Labour Party, Green Party, etc.

2. Associate each cluster with news organizations that tightly align with their policies.

3. Evaluate stories - headlines in only one cluster (under reported elsewhere) represent a view. Headlines that have different takes, likewise, give you a spectrum of thought on an issue or topic.

4. Collect fine points and build a report. Bonus for providing contrasting opinions and associating them with the party/power responsible for that thinking.

I want this tool. It'd be okay if it wasn't perfect. Just getting 80% of the way there would be incredibly valuable. I'd pay for it.

When I started working on Zeitgaist [1] I immediately recognized that biased information is the main problem. I'm currently thinking about attaching additional information to the sources I present like ground [2] is doing with political spectrums. I really like your idea for the news algorithm. If you or someone elsw wants to build something like that on top of Zeitgaist with me, don't hesitate to contact me.

[1] https://zeitgaist.ai [2] https://ground.news/

Your "etc" includes some very powerful ethnic groups. Are you planning on "identifying" them?

I didn't think so.

I don't see why you can't. Throw religion in while you're at it. Even interest groups around other classes: disability, socioeconomic, etc.

You can absolutely say a newspaper (or individual columnist or editor) is pro-LGBT, pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-Mormon, pro-Amish, pro-Atheist, etc. That shouldn't be controversial. Wikipedia can and does do this in a relatively neutral way.

If your classification is meant to disparage a group, then I'd see the trouble. Don't do that.

I want an up to date, well rounded view of how everyone sees the world. A system capable of getting me to see geopolitical events in other perspectives is useful, even if I ultimately choose to uphold my existing beliefs.

FWIW, I subscribe to all sorts of diverse political view subreddits and Twitter handles. Unfortunately, it's still hardly comprehensive is a lot of work to analyze and distill.

What we're really talking about here is boting any deviation from a tabula rasa appraisal of reality, then clustering that into an affiliation/quality, right?

I.e. Christians (as an averaged whole) can look at the same situation as a blank slate and have a statistically significant and consistently different perspective

As can scientists. As can maybe microbiologists and industrial chemists.

The point of the clustering isn't that the tags are pejorative, but that they're predictive metadata on any source's bias.

And often times that's currently unexposed. I see a post by echelon, but only by the content of that single post (and maybe some prior HN contact) can I reconstruct his typical perspectives.

It would probably include some institutions masquerading as representatives of ethnic groups but that isnt quite the same thing.

1. Will your cluster identification be unbiased? How do you avoid providing more fine-grained taxonomy for clusters that hit close to home for you (or this tool’s operator) and shoving the rest into as few buckets as possible (because you don’t care)? 2. What about biases shared by all news organizations, regardless of cluster?

Technically speaking, if every day you take an uniformly random selection of news articles, on average what you read will not be biased. Or, to be precise, it will follow the same biases as the population of news articles you sample from.

> what you read will not be biased. Or to be precise [...]

Your "to be precise" sentence states directly that what you read WILL be biased.

Replace “news articles” with “facts” and you’re closer to the point, but then how useful would that input be to you?

The difference is that facts are harder to consume than news articles, as the latter is essentially packaged and distributed collections of the former.

Furthermore, the intent of parent's bias averaging, as I understand it, is...

1) There are a finite number of major biases axes in mass media (e.g. political parties, wealthy-poor, conservative-liberal, etc.), ergo averaging these out is a helpful reduction of major biases

2) It assumes the underlying material has a bias, and seeks to counteract it. If you build a fact-based method, you leave yourself open to treating biased opinions as facts, if they're sufficiently masked

Indeed, the first challenge to unbiased approach would be the impossible in practical terms task of separating facts from fiction.

I don’t know if it is clear but I really meant it that unbiased news is not a possibility due to fundamental limitations of information theory and finiteness of individual information processing capabilities; self-awareness and bias transparency is the only way.

> helpful reduction of major biases

Only if those major biases are opposite between media.

Imagine biases as vectors pointing in arbitrary directions. Best case is when bias vector in one cluster is compensated by exactly opposite bias vector in another cluster, but how often do you expect that to happen? A more typical scenario is a vector pointing in merely a different, rather than opposite, direction. A worst-case scenario, and also common (because bias manifests itself in selection if facts to report, and most sources report on the same events), is when all bias vectors point in a similar direction.

In your original (upthread) argument that "unbiased news is not a possibility", are you stating that as a fundamental consequence of the news' lossy compression of {all facts} into a smaller product... or something else? It's unclear.

As for averaging out, yes, the vector model was what I was using internally.

Disclosure: I'm US-based, so our politics are traditionally bipolar as a result of our election system (in contrast to Europe et al.).

I would be surprised if vectors don't cancel often though, because think what we're really talking about in a capitalist information space: popular perspectives that are profitably marketable.

What is the easiest way to find an audience? Do what your competitors are not.

So on the whole, high revenue and production cost media (tv, web) in a capitalist information space will converge into bipolar pairs on any given issue, in order to maximize market share.

In lower cost media or operations, it will more likely be a random scattering of vectors.

> Disclosure: I'm US-based, so our politics are traditionally bipolar as a result of our election system (in contrast to Europe et al.).

There's a whole lot of bias that's "baked in" with US politics / media. There's broad consensus on neoliberal capitalism, personal freedoms vs collectivism, common ground on opposing states like Russia and China.

On a few wedge issues you will average out to a common ground, but ultimately you're not eliminating bias, you're just eliminating a relatively small bias between left-wing and right-wing US and replacing it with an "overall US" bias.

From mass market sources, true. Probably because they're aiming towards the common American, who generally has similar feelings. Ergo, they're that + whichever politically-polarized biases.

As for whether averaging that out is useful...?

I'd be happy to have news from a "overall US" bias, without the right/left political spin.

It's almost impossible to arrive at a pure random sampling like that. As an easy example, if you limit yourself to English news articles, you're going to have a pretty large bias towards "the West", which right now probably includes a strong bias against China or Russian's viewpoints on things (not to say that including those viewpoints would be more truthful necessarily, but certainly less biased).

To add: where I wrote “be aware of your bias and upfront about it” I of course meant journalists and news organizations.

Corollary: since this awareness of the bias requires self-honesty and introspection, it’s drastically more difficult with an LLM because you also need to know all about your LLM developer and operator’s accidental and intentional biases.

Because the project is small right now (and makes no money), I've included a very limited list of sources for each category, however at scale we would have alot of options for getting past this.

For example, one way in theory is to scrape all known publicly available news sites and create an article for every single detected story, but this would be very expensive.

As someone with experience in the media, what steps would you take to find these under-reported stories? Maybe the steps can be replicated with AI to increase coverage?

> the most important news stories are often the ones that go unreported/underreported by most news sites

twitter and reddit do a pretty good job publicizing it though

> editors play a crucial role in shaping the news by deciding which events to cover and which to ignore

As seen recently when Fox buried the story of their defamation case.

I think the The idea of this is interesting but I agree with you, Using titles to correlate results that are fact based isn't a greatest way to find unbiased information. You would still need some kind of variable that was not so well known. echo chambers are created by repeating information in similar ways. Its been my experience that echo chambers usually are the least reliable.

Your comment reminded me of this quote from Howard Zinn (who had his own biases, of course):

But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts, omitted, are not important.

It won't solve the basic issue you bring up, but https://www.improvethenews.org/ at least help to make us more aware of those biases.

There's also https://ground.news/

What are some of your thoughts on the subject? How can somebody achieve unbiased news without editorial supervision? Would a quorum solve the issue with editorial biases creeping into news?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com