Hacker News Reader

Comment by visekr | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to tap into that eventually! Right now I'm using an API that give me a dump of like all articles and I filter that through a list of 'credible' sources. I'm not the most educated about what are good sources for this but this is my current one. (it also shows on the site under - 'what is this') Would loveee feedback on this list.

Allowed Sources Major Wire Services (1.0) Reuters, AP, AFP, Bloomberg Top US News (0.9) NYT, WaPo, WSJ, ProPublica

Conservative Media (0.7-0.8) Fox News, National Review, Washington Times, The Dispatch, Washington Examiner, RealClearPolitics, Reason

Progressive Media (0.7-0.8) Mother Jones, The Nation, Democracy Now!, New Republic, Jacobin, Truthout, Slate

International (0.8-0.9) BBC, Guardian, FT, Economist, DW, France24, Al Jazeera

Fact Checkers (0.9) FactCheck.org, PolitiFact

Major Networks (0.8) NPR, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNBC

Digital Media (0.7-0.8) Atlantic, Wired, Axios, USA Today, Time

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Putting the openly biased/partisan (and more often than not intentionally deceptive) media sources at the same level as major networks, digital media, and the low end of international media seems like a mistake to me. It lends an undeserved level of credibility to the extremely biased sources, and at the same time unfairly conflates the other media sources with them.

So does the Digital Media group as a whole - it seems overly reductive, and the sources are too varying in quality/reliability to be given the same weight. And does something like Time really fit in there, considering they've been print media for the vast majority of their existence?

(Love the project overall, though! Thanks for creating and sharing.)

>> Would loveee feedback on this list

OK, my feedback is that it is a very left leaning list of sources. I use a site, https://www.allsides.com, that does media bias ratings and rates sites from -6 (high left bias) to 6 (high right bias), and outside of the ones you have listed specifically listed as "Conservative Media", every site that I could find was negative, other than the FT which was listed as "Center" with no numerical rating. Yes, even the WSJ, although that was WSJ news rather than opinion, opinion was slightly right.

Here's the list I got, I had to make some choices on what to use, "ABC" for example can refer to different things.

The Nation -5.00

Slate -4.50

Democracy Now! -4.00

Mother Jones -4.00

New Republic -4.00

Jacobin -4.00

The Atlantic -4.00

Guardian -3.50

AP -3.10

AFP -3.10

Wired -2.75

Time Magazine -2.30

TruthOut -2.00

Politifact -2.00

ProPublica -2.00

NPR -2.00

CBS News (Online) -1.50

FactCheck.org -1.60

Washington Post -1.63

NBC News Digital -1.80

New York Times -2.20

Al Jazeera -2.30

Bloomberg -2.40

USA Today -2.00

Axios -1.70

ABC News (Online) -1.42

Economist -1.40

CNBC -0.90

Reuters -0.89

BBC -0.80

WSJ -0.20

FT ? Rated as Center with no #

RealClearPolitics 0.16

Reason 0.28

The Dispatch 2.00

Washington Times 2.00

Washington Examiner 2.30

National Review 2.50

Fox News (digital) 3.88

If you're trying to build a left leaning media bubble, you're doing a pretty good job. I would be curious to see results from the opposite, choose a few examples of "Liberal Media", and populate the rest of the list with sources that were rated as leaning right.

And I'm sure some people will disagree with the allsides bias ratings. There's no way to be completely objective on something like that. They seem pretty believable to me, but I'm not watching the same movie y'all are.

If a website rates the economist as left leaning it's maybe a sign of the bias in the evaluation and how much the discourse has been pushed to the right (in the US at least)

It's a reasonable take on the actual political climate in the US. Trump has a 50% approval rating, the border between approving and disapproving of him is mathematically (approximately) the political center.

Are you comfortable sharing which API you use?

of course! WorldNewsAPI - wasn't my first pick but was the most affordable for me, but i like it so far, no complaints!

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