ByDarko Savic
A news site that adds a fictional solution to every story's underlying problem
2 years ago
1
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Idea
Darko Savic Mar 23, 2022
A peer-reviewed news publication with zero tolerance of manipulation or bias in the articles
Image credit: Hannah Mckay, Reuters
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Bounty for the best solution
Provide a bounty for the best solution
Bounties attract serious brainpower to the challenge.
A way to achieve zero propaganda, bias, and manipulation of public opinion in a news publication. Peer review combined with an open scoring system ensures that articles report what happened, but not why it happened and what it means.
Why?
- Let people think for themselves without trying to influence their conclusions.
- Gain readers' trust by transparently removing manipulation, propaganda, and bias from your reporting.
- Instead of spreading propaganda, report the actual news.
How it works
A news site known for zero tolerance of propaganda, bias, and manipulation of public opinion. If something can't be reported without bias, then don't report it at all. Pass on that one and let other outlets handle it the usual way.
Some things to watch out for
News media manipulates the public opinion by:
- Selectively reporting on events that fit the desired story.
- Sprinkling opinion all over the facts.
- Explaining what the events mean.
- Clever use of words to elicit the desired emotions in readers.
- Skipping or barely mentioning events that don't support the desired story.
- What else?
Reputation score of writers/reviewers
On this objective news site all writers double as reviewers. Each news article has to be reviewed by at least 5 other writers before being published. After it goes live, the readers can see which reviewers approved it. Their reputation is on the line equally as the writer's.
Not only that... The readers can see which writers subsequently saw the article. If they saw it, they have an obligation to point out any wrongdoings. Their reputation is on the line just because they saw the article and didn't react. If they don't object to anything stated in the article, it is assumed that they endorse it as unbiased.
Every writer starts with maximum score (100%) and lose it with each mistake they make. When their points fall below a threshold they can no longer work for the news site.
Every reviewer seeing the article has up to an hour to object and point out anything that even remotely resembles:
- manipulation of the reader's feelings about something
- state something without referencing a source (the source's reputation is added automatically, see below).
Whenever a reviewer points out something that should be addressed, they clear all other reviewers' reputation about that particular thing. Only if all reviewers miss something that later turns out to be wrong, do all of them get a negative mark on their reputation.
This puts all reviewers/writers under an obligation to object and point out anything that can be considered foul play.
How do the reviewers get checked? By the other side, of course. Every other media outlet that promotes the opposing viewpoint will be happy to point out anything wrong and poke holes in what the "non-biased media" is trying to do.
Reputation score of sources
When repeating information obtained from 3rd party sources, the journalist always mentions the source of information. Next to the source the system automatically appends the chances (in percentage) that the information is true.
The truth percentage is calculated based on historic statistics for each particular source. If in the future it turns out that the source was wrong, this goes on its record and lowers the source's overall truth percentage score. When a source's percentage falls below a treshold, the news site can no longer use that source.
This achieves:
- Weeding out of bad sources.
- People learn to intuitively take every piece of news with a grain of salt.
- Increases the source's obligation to stand behind what they report and pay the consequence when it backfires.
Open unbiased press reputation score system
People with reputable press accreditation get to publicly call each other out via the reputation score system. Any journalist can present a case against another. They point to sentences within a specific article and state what is wrong with them (with evidence if possible). A randomly chosen set of 9 journalists have to weigh in to decide whether the journalist/article in question loses points.
If the journalist loses points, so do all others who reviewed that particular article (menitoned in paragraphs above).
The article has to be edited/re-reviewed within 48 hours or it gets marked as biased/propaganda. All changes go on record and a historic versions of each article can be seen. People can see what was edited and why.
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Creative contributions
How to solve the problem of constructed events?
You know, PR specialists influence on public opinion by creating special events, pretending to be natural. For example, in a war you can pay to special people who take on military uniform of a certain с country, have documents of its millitary personnel, and do some war criminal activity: killing civilian population, raping children, using cruel torture, applying prohibited weapons, etc. So, all evidence and witnesses will say that some country does that. This is one of the leading ways to control public opinion nowadays worldwide. How would your media fight this?
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General comments
jnikola2 years ago
The bias of the information sources
Since you would pass on the news which cannot be presented objectively, would there be any news? The sources you collect information from are always biased. I saw you focused mostly on how the news would be reviewed, but maybe another great thing would be to focus on news data collection and the sources. One thing that crosses my mind is to do many interviews of both sides and then present their intersection.
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Darko Savic2 years ago
J. Nikola the "Reputation score of sources" deals what that exact aspect.
You can't always interview people. Especially when you don't have any trustworthy journalists in the area. You have to take other sources' data. But you can state whose data it is and display their score. You can eliminate the sources that fall below a trustworthiness threshold. If for some news you don't have a source with a high enough score, you don't report it. You could report that there is something going on about X but none of the sources are trustworthy.
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Goran Radanovic2 years ago
This would be great if it existed. The problem with such institutions, like most, is they get compromised. They succumb to the allure of money, and the people bribing them don't mind paying a lot because they'll make more from the misinformation.
Something similar to your idea is fact-checkers, who are supposed to be independent, but the company they're fact-checking has hired them.
Sometimes the best option is to tune out the news. Denzel Washington said that if you don't get the news, you're uninformed, but if you get the news, you're misinformed.
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Darko Savic2 years ago
Goran Radanovic agreed. One point to mention about my idea is that the journalist's name gets tarnished by selling out. It stays on the record. This means, there are only so many times one can sell out. Soon enough their career is over. There are tons of news to cover daily. Plenty of material for bad actors to weed themselves out of journalism.
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