Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

New platforms help overcome biased news reporting

news app
Tero Vesalainen/Getty Images

With so many media outlets in the world today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find unbiased news, if not distinguish fact from fiction. News consumers’ reliance on social media, algorithms and preferred media outlets often ends up reinforcing opinions rather than helping develop independent, unbiased views.

And while 78 percent of Americans said that “it is never acceptable for a news organization to favor one political party over others when reporting the news,” according to the Pew Research Center, bias has seeped into the majority of news outlets, making it increasingly difficult for consumers to receive news that is nonpartisan.

But there are a growing number of platforms that want to help people understand media bias and improve their news consumption habits.


Take, for example, Kamy Akhavan, a former CEO of ProCon who has dedicated much of his career to promoting civil communication and improving civic education. Akhavan formed ProCon to reflect his passions while delivering non-biased information through “beneficial confusion,” a technique that offered opposing viewpoints on a wide range of political, social and policy issues so readers could “engage in evaluative thinking to formulate their own views,” he explained.

“The goal is not to persuade but rather to educate,” he said. “The goal is to let the reader come to their own conclusions and judge for themselves what they want to do with that information.”

He also stressed the importance of education when discerning between biases, claiming, “The problem associated with a lack of media literacy are really an outgrowth of the fact that we have 24/7 news cycles and thousands of media sources, including citizen journalism, which may be well intentioned, but oftentimes isn't very good.”

AllSides, led by CEO John Gable, has followed a similar approach, hoping to expose individuals to different ideas and information from all sides of the political spectrum to provide a fuller picture. They have also created the AllSides Media Bias Rating to help readers understand a news platform’s slant.

Gable focuses on helping people who want to solve problems, because they are ones who will bring about change. “Enable them to see the different sides, enable them to understand what's really going on, enable them to share and be open about it so that they aren't overly attached and have to hide their true opinions behind some kind of wall,” he said.

Among the media platforms that earned “center” ratings on the AllSides media bias chart:

  • Axios
  • BBC
  • Christian Science Monitor
  • Reuters
  • Wall Street Journal news (the WSJ opinion section leans right)

(The Fulcrum also earned a “center” rating from AllSides.)

AllSides has also become dedicated to ending polarization. The platform has been focused on fighting “filter bubbles,” a phenomenon that occurs when people are only exposed to ideas, news and conversations that align with their own beliefs. AllSides hopes to combat polarization by equipping individuals with knowledge and empathy to engage in productive dialogue through the dissemination of a broad range of perspectives.

Gable added that along with information that conforms to a person’s beliefs, “you need the difference, the arguments and the unexpected ideas” to overcome divides and hatred for the opposing side.

He is hopeful for the future of news media—an unusually optimistic outlook given the continuing downward trend regarding Americans’ trust in the media. Gable believes the key to turning around the news industry is overcoming misinformation: “The way to deal with misinformation is not by trying to control it, but by debunking it in a world of open ideas and data.”

Large media corporations like Yahoo News and even Facebook have begun to incorporate technology that discourages misinformation and questions the credibility of their news sources. For example, Yahoo News has just acquired The Factual, a company focused on rating the credibility of news sources through different algorithms and technologies.

Other sources for balanced perspectives and media ratings include:

  • NewsGuard, a browser extension that provides ratings on media platforms.
  • The Flipside, a newsletter that shares perspectives from the right, middle and center on some of the biggest issues of the day.

While ProCon, AllSides and others like them are designed to help news consumers, Akhavan would prefer to see solutions that attack the issue earlier, such as developing critical thinking skills in K-12 education. He suggests that children should be taught to “to question the accuracy of the information to question whether or not there's multiple perspectives in a particular presentation or single perspectives, to see if any of the languages that tended to be persuasive or whether the language is intended to be informative.”

This skill, coupled with a media literacy proficiency, would better equip Americans to recognize biases and arm them with the tools to overcome deceptions from a single, possibly misinformed, media source. Instead, they would be more likely to look for different viewpoints, question the credibility of their sources, and formulate an opinion for themselves.

Read More

The American Schism in 2025: The New Cultural Revolution

A street vendor selling public domain Donald Trump paraphernalia and souvenirs. The souvenirs are located right across the street from the White House and taken on the afternoon of July 21, 2019 near Pennslyvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Getty Images, P_Wei

The American Schism in 2025: The New Cultural Revolution

A common point of bewilderment today among many of Trump’s “establishment” critics is the all too tepid response to Trump’s increasingly brazen shattering of democratic norms. True, he started this during his first term, but in his second, Trump seems to relish the weaponization of his presidency to go after his enemies and to brandish his corrupt dealings, all under the Trump banner (e.g. cyber currency, Mideast business dealings, the Boeing 747 gift from Qatar). Not only does Trump conduct himself with impunity but Fox News and other mainstream media outlets barely cover them at all. (And when left-leaning media do, the interest seems to wane quickly.)

Here may be the source of the puzzlement: the left intelligentsia continues to view and characterize MAGA as a political movement, without grasping its transcendence into a new dominant cultural order. MAGA rose as a counter-establishment partisan drive during Trump’s 2016 campaign and subsequent first administration; however, by the 2024 election, it became evident that MAGA was but the eye of a full-fledged cultural shift, in some ways akin to Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Keep ReadingShow less
Should States Regulate AI?

Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-CA, speaks at an AI conference on Capitol Hill with experts

Provided

Should States Regulate AI?

WASHINGTON —- As House Republicans voted Thursday to pass a 10-year moratorium on AI regulation by states, Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-CA, and AI experts said the measure would be necessary to ensure US dominance in the industry.

“We want to make sure that AI continues to be led by the United States of America, and we want to make sure that our economy and our society realizes the potential benefits of AI deployment,” Obernolte said.

Keep ReadingShow less
The AI Race We Need: For a Better Future, Not Against Another Nation

The concept of AI hovering among the public.

Getty Images, J Studios

The AI Race We Need: For a Better Future, Not Against Another Nation

The AI race that warrants the lion’s share of our attention and resources is not the one with China. Both superpowers should stop hurriedly pursuing AI advances for the sake of “beating” the other. We’ve seen such a race before. Both participants lose. The real race is against an unacceptable status quo: declining lifespans, increasing income inequality, intensifying climate chaos, and destabilizing politics. That status quo will drag on, absent the sorts of drastic improvements AI can bring about. AI may not solve those problems but it may accelerate our ability to improve collective well-being. That’s a race worth winning.

Geopolitical races have long sapped the U.S. of realizing a better future sooner. The U.S. squandered scarce resources and diverted talented staff to close the alleged missile gap with the USSR. President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightfully noted, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He realized that every race comes at an immense cost. In this case, the country was “spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Closeup of Software engineering team engaged in problem-solving and code analysis

Closeup of Software engineering team engaged in problem-solving and code analysis.

Getty Images, MTStock Studio

AI Is Here. Our Laws Are Stuck in the Past.

Artificial intelligence (AI) promises a future once confined to science fiction: personalized medicine accounting for your specific condition, accelerated scientific discovery addressing the most difficult challenges, and reimagined public education designed around AI tutors suited to each student's learning style. We see glimpses of this potential on a daily basis. Yet, as AI capabilities surge forward at exponential speed, the laws and regulations meant to guide them remain anchored in the twentieth century (if not the nineteenth or eighteenth!). This isn't just inefficient; it's dangerously reckless.

For too long, our approach to governing new technologies, including AI, has been one of cautious incrementalism—trying to fit revolutionary tools into outdated frameworks. We debate how century-old privacy torts apply to vast AI training datasets, how liability rules designed for factory machines might cover autonomous systems, or how copyright law conceived for human authors handles AI-generated creations. We tinker around the edges, applying digital patches to analog laws.

Keep ReadingShow less