• gravitas_deficiency
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    6 months ago

    Explain?

    It’s a news aggregator whose primary standout feature is scanning for similar articles across tons of news sites across the ideological spectrum, and points out where stories are predominantly or entirely present or absent from one side or the other. It’s not perfect by any means, but I think it does actually provide some meaningful value in terms of offering the context of possible political narratives, especially in entrenched two-party systems.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      6 months ago

      I think the whole premise is wrong. It’s based on the narrative that news organizations have an agenda to push some kind of bias. Sure some are (like FoxNews) but many aren’t like that.

      There are people working for news organizations that will have a bias (they’re human) but different people working for the same company can have different biases.

      It also pushes the idea that the news isn’t real, that it’s a made up thing and you just have to choose the one that conforms to how you want things to be. But there is reality and there is the truth. If a respectable news organization quotes Joe Biden, you can trust that Joe Biden said those words. It’s something that happened. If they quote Donald Trump then that is something he said. That doesn’t mean what Biden or Trump said was true, but it’s true that they said those words.

      Most of the news is just reporting on facts. With a little bit of news literacy you can know the facts and when a small amount of bias slips into a story you can recognize it and disregard it.

      Something like Ground News is a statement that bias is more significant than fact. Even if were the case that bias is more significant than fact, then why should we trust Ground News to not be biased themself? When they say something is left biased or right biased, how can we be sure it’s not their bias isn’t influencing how they’re categorizing things?

      Sure the news industry is producing more and more opinion pieces now because opinions are cheaper than gathering facts. A lot of people apparently like being told how to think about things. But usually opinion pieces are marked as such. Ground News doesn’t help with the emphasis on opinion in the media, it’s just putting a meta layer of their opinion on opinion pieces and labeling all news as opinion.

      • Etterra@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Everybody has a bias. Some just hide or try to remove it more than others. Faux News was built from the ground up explicitly to be the GOP’s propaganda mill, and MSNBC has a clear liberal bias. Ground News at least tells you where the bias leans. There’s been data published on bias - how much and what kind - for ages. The idea of impartial news was only around for a few decades in the 20th century. Now it’s a largely baseless claim. But if you look at news print media from, say, the late 1800s through early 1900s you can see the bias clear as day.