Mitigating media bias

Abstract

The bias in the news media is an inherent flaw of the news production process, spanning news gathering, writing, and editing stages. Producer's subjective valuation, wittingly or unwittingly, takes place during the daily production process. The resulting bias often causes a sharp increase in political polarization and in the cost of conflict on social issues such as Iraq war [3]. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for readers to have penetrating views on realities against such bias. We propose NewsCube, a novel Internet news service framework aiming at mitigating the effect of media bias. NewsCube is designed to automatically create and promptly provide readers with multiple classified viewpoints on a news event of interest. It helps readers to easily discover rich facts and compare diverse biased views on the event. In this paper, we discuss the design of the NewsCube framework and introduce novel approaches which are under development.