Recognizing blogging bias

(from http://osviews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2722)

Kelly McNeill, operator of osviews.com, writes about bias in blogging:
"publishers of tech news sites that cherry pick links, and claim that this strategy keeps the site from being associated with bias", "a trend in continually linking to select number of articles that cary [sic] the same controversial subject matter", etc.

Blogs, as opposed to more traditional news aggregators (e.g. Slashdot) and news sites (e.g. The Register), are surely more personal in nature. The 'party line' that is followed is the often varying (based on differing input), often inconsistent (based on similar input) point of view of one individual. This point of view has a low "ideological inertia" and so can be tossed on the tempest of perception of an individual subjecting his- or herself to such a wide or narrow variety of inputs.

'Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.'
- Gulf by Robert Heinlein

McNeill then writes two closely entwined but seemingly contradictory statements:

• 'The only logical alternative is to let the community dictate coverage'
• 'News editors that feel inclined to incorporate personal bias into the content only stand to eventually cause their readers to be disenchanted with the content they publish'

Now community coverage is what weblogs are tending toward; in fact this is what they are. But this community-dictated coverage should be de-multiplexed from the parent blog. Comments on blogs could have an attribution mechanism (persistent, cross-site, etc) that would then enable the 2nd statement to be true.

McNeill's disillusionment seems to stem from tiring of sorting the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff, looking for the diamond in the rough and the Emperor's New Clothes. Is it bad that the "publishers are sifting it for you"?

This is no more than a change in roles. The publisher is currently the teller of the story. The 'facts' are presented. Do you want the AP, Reuters, AFP, Xinhua, ABCD[isney], CBS, Fox, SABC, BBC, DW, Ananova, Daily *, Sunday *, *Times or even usinfo.state.gov version?

News.google.com, Slashdot, Fark, et al aggregate these for you. Browsing from a central repository might show inconsistency in interpretation, but probably not on basic facts (at least, not after the first few versions have been proofread and fact-checked by millions).

The choice is NOT: Who is your source?
The choice is NOW: Who is your source-choosing proxy?

If your proxy is news.google.com, how do you evaluate news.google.com? Is it systematically leading you to the Dark Side (Bush / Microsoft / Tory / Nuclear - delete as appropriate)? The Online Journalism Review's article Balancing Act shows that even simple differences in search terms can show difference in bias.

So, who do you trust?

Who do you trust?
You cannot personally verify details of friends of friends of friends ad nauseam. Google's Orkut helps build social networks, and all that remains is for trust (á là PGP) and recommendations (á là Amazon, Firefly, et al) to be integrated and presented individually.

Google does it already, and makes the results available free of charge to the public. It's called PageRank :) But it's not individualised.

Not yet.