* Skewz, a media rating site for political news
The wisdom of crowds is a powerful concept that I’ve written about many times. Its value lies, potentially, in establishing what the general consensus on any given subject is. I use “potentially” because an underlying issue is whether members of the crowd are being honest. It only takes a campaign by those with a vested interest in the outcome, and a lack of control in establishing identities and monitoring for fraud, for the results to be distorted to a greater or lesser degree.
That said there are some noble experiments now online that are producing interesting results and that have the potential to go much further. The one that caught my eye today is Skewz.
Skewz explains itself as “a media rating site for political news. You can rate anything on the Internet in terms of its political bias whether that’s liberal or conservative. The bias could be “good bias” or ‘bad bias,’ that’s up to you. That pretty much sums up the site.”
On Skewz you can read political news and check the crowd’s assessment of an article or blog entry’s political bias and popularity. You can submit “political news from media sources (articles, videos, picture, editorials, etc.) or blogs and rate that submission in terms of political bias.” You can vote on the liberal or conservative bias of submissions, and leave comments.
The results are fascinating. Many submissions on Skewz have great discussion threads with some really insightful comments. One thing that comes across clearly is that the crowd does generally see individual big media sources as having different intrinsic biases on different issues.
For example, in every category in the source comparison table – Civil Liberties, Domestic Policy, Economic Policy, Elections 2008, Energy & Technology, Feminism and Gender, Foreign Policy, Health, and Other (note that these are further broken down to a more fine-grained levels, for example, Civil Liberties are divided into Abortion, Gay Marriage, Separation of Church and State, Evolution/Creationism, Flag Burning, Media/Journalism, Weapons Ban, and Capital Punishment) – the source americanthinker.com is rated overall as quite strongly conservative (which would seem to run counter to its name; wouldn’t you expect a publication called “thinker” to have a more mixed rating?). Conversely firedoglake.com is unremittingly liberal and, surprisingly, one of the worst newspapers in the world, the U.K.’s Daily Mail, is completely mixed (although it doesn’t feature in several categories at all) as is salon.com.
What’s missing from Skewz are more derivative assessments of bias. Here we have a wealth of data, but we’re missing measurements of statistical confidence, overall source bias ratings, and crowd interest levels.
But here’s the thing: If Skewz ratings could become really important in the eyes of the media and we could see a Skewz button alongside the obligatory lineup of social networking tools such as Digg and Del.ico.us we would have a way for the public to see how the crowd perceives the media’s bias and for the media to know its bias is transparent.
In the quest for rationality and objectivism in the media, Skewz is a promising tool for the public to understand and underline biases and dissembling.
