> This leads the platform to publish dodgy stories from the right, with the appearance that they are just as valid as high-fact reporting from the left or the center.
Sadly, this is downstream of mainstream news itself. I think if Ground News attempted to truly solve this problem, the right would condemn Ground News as "fake news" or controlled by Soros like they do Wikipedia.
I'm looking to be skeptical of Ground News, because almost all YouTube sponsors are scams, and we remember Honey was recently exposed as a scam, but this isn't enough to convince me.
this NYT opinion piece from a few years back was impactful to my understanding about the destructive nature of such a false dichotomy - as it pertains to Lebanon
Essentially that in a state of sectarian politics, everything is political.
> ..."During the course of the dinner, someone mentioned the unusual hailstorms that had pelted Beirut the previous two nights. Everyone offered an explanation for this extreme weather event, before Malcolm, tongue in cheek, asked his guests, “Do you think the Syrians did it?”...
That said, having it as the main tool in the toolbox* is...
Something to be skeptical about?
*Bundled up with another in-your-face one like "personal experience", this also screams "political".. and thus hard to take seriously (particularly when those personal experiences are actually relevant)
Freshness- whatever. You probably already know fresh is somewhat popular, but are you really sure you want to be right but not loved? Be respected by your (fr)enemies maybe? Not even that?
(I'm certainly skeptical about "loved for being right" :)
Honey, Established Titles, BetterHelp, 7CupsofTea, RAID Shadow Legends, FTX, OperaGX, AG1, Factor, HelloFresh, AirUp. How many am I missing? How much more do we need to see to be convinced?
I won’t use Ground News or Brilliant (I tried it in 2019 and was unimpressed) because they market so aggressively, something doesn’t smell right!
Don't forget Incogni, I was tempted to subscribe but as you point out, when you see the other kind of services/products youtubers tend to peddle, it gives me pause.
Anything advertising on youtube or podcasts is a negative indicator for me as these platforms have followed the path of talk radio in having a very high ratio of the products that advertise on them being dodgy if not outright scams.
I'm sure there are exceptions that are totally fine, but the pattern follows often enough that if I don't have a pre-existing relationship with a brand before seeing/hearing a youtube or podcast ad for it, it goes into the scam bucket in my head just through the negative advertising platform connection.
I saw something a while back about how to start a watch company. Essentially source some junk, use highly targeted social media ads to look like a real brand, then profit.
To be a bit pedantic, I think that YouTube sponsors aren't necessarily scams, but are definitely not generally good products or deals. It's a spectrum.
The damage is already done, the American Overton Window was successfully shifted right by that brand of ideology with relentless xenophobia and provincial nativism that began with ex-Nixon administration affiliates and also AM proto-hate radio like Paul Harvey. Furthermore, both the mainstream political left and right have been coopted and corrupted by big money, what Gore Vidal called the Property party. Equivocal bothsidesism between center-left and far-right is disinformational malpractice with gerrymandered goalposts.
Plus, advertising on every Youtube channel makes me suspicious.
>The data collected here shows that left-leaning stories tend to have far better sourcing than right-leaning ones
In the same breath, he quotes an article about it dousing Newfoundland in microplastics; a broad sweeping conclusion from a laughably flawed study method for the given results. And to be fair, this isn't a diss on the student's effort: scientific study is the holy grail. However, that headline and what was actually done represent two incredibly different things.
So in actuality, perhaps he's just calling his own biases out: The Left leaning articles published in Ground News often attempt to invent consensus by quoting one-off studies. Perhaps his own desire "to be right" or social pressure "to be on the forefront of knowledge" fans the thirst for early conclusions.
Similarly, the author's "Truth" sections are rather glib and misleading. Each one could be its own article and analysis, i.e., a proper fact-check, but he seems to have rushed to the conclusions.
Am I missing something? Seems the problem is with dodgy, poorly sourced journalism, not Ground News who seem to be doing what they can.
I think there is a false sense of everything being left v right. Perhaps there could be a few more spectrums on there e.g environmental, fiscal, social?
I think the only way to approach this is to have a panel of credible people for each beat (maybe from academia) who can qualitatively asses a range of articles and curate a spectrum of articles.
However this is all scooting around the fundamental problem that we are all individually responsible for critical thinking - ideally developed through primary and secondary education.
It's the downfall of having zero accountability, infinite reach, and anyone can become a "citizen journalist" without credible, less biased, subject matter experts curating things as a final, fact-checking arbiter.
I see where the author is coming from. The author's main gripe is that non-factual right-wing stories are being presented as left-wing blindspots. The author would seemingly prefer that those stories be flagged as being untrustworthy due to low factuality scores among its sources. Understandable but I think it defeats the purpose of Ground News.
I think the idea is that if you are seeking the truth, and Ground News shows you a story that's being covered exclusively by right or left wing sources, that's their signal that the story could be either a) bullshit, or b) something one side is conveniently ignoring because it runs counter to their agenda. Ultimately it's up to you to you to decide. But, this way, if you hear this story being talked about elsewhere, you've now encountered it and know that it's being almost exclusively covered by one side.
> Ground News shows you a story that's being covered exclusively by right or left wing sources, that's their signal that the story could be either a) bullshit,
Except this isn't what this guy found. What he found was that right-wing-only stories were invariably lies.
You'd have a point if there was also the same tendency to lying on "the left" (whoever that is supposed to be). Just because you can come up with two sides to an issue doesn't make them equally valid.
There is a truly massive amount of people attempting to prevent criticism of right wing people by constantly deflecting everything with "oh the left wing is just as bad!" and there's an annoying type of person who sees that and believes it.
Like, lies and propaganda are bad for us and our society but we can't get anywhere talking about if everyone has to constantly pretend there are two sides to it.
Most of the examples this article cites are ones that exclude any coverage from left-leaning sources—and these are often highly biased articles, frequently lacking in merit. Even with tools like Ground News, media literacy is still essential; you can’t just throw it out the window. From my perspective, it offers a much broader view than simply sticking to one or two news outlets—especially ones you'd normally avoid at all costs (which, to me, is the whole point of the Blindspot feature). While it does provide some historical data, media ownership information, and other insights depending on your subscription level, ultimately it's up to the reader to decide whether the coverage is legitimate.
Just to add to my earlier point: Ground News is not a fact-checking service, nor does it claim to be one. While it does provide factual data about media sources, that information is aggregated from multiple third-party evaluators, as stated on its information page. It doesn’t verify the truth of individual news reports—it simply shows how a story was covered.
Naturally, this means the platform includes misinformation, political spin, and propaganda—because it’s not designed to tell you whether a story is true. As for the Blindspot feature, it may flag sources with a history of low factual reporting, but ultimately, it’s still up to you to decide how trustworthy any given coverage is.
I often see this defence of, "it's up to the reader to decide!" pop up in circumstances like this.
The vast majority of the time it's used to justify either lying or repeating lies.
What exactly is the use of a website apparently designed to give equal weight to lies and facts? How does that benefit anyone?
The world doesn't need yet another journalism-related resource that repeats what other people say instead of attempting to actually find the truth. But doing the former is massively cheaper and easier than the latter.
That first stacked bar chart appears to have "left" and "right" mixed up, if the analysis just below it is correct. Not confidence-inspiring, and hasn't been corrected in 18 months since the post was published...
The analysis seems to disagree with the data shown in the graphs about the labels of "left" and "right". The author seems to be confusing left/right? It's not just the first stacked bar, but also the third (avg %bias)
I think what you’re seeing is a confusion coming from ground news own terms. They call something a “left wing blind spot” when it’s a story that does not appear in left-wing sources, meaning that it only appears in right wing sources. The blog copies that terminology here, but it can lead to some confusion.
Readit News
Sadly, this is downstream of mainstream news itself. I think if Ground News attempted to truly solve this problem, the right would condemn Ground News as "fake news" or controlled by Soros like they do Wikipedia.
I'm looking to be skeptical of Ground News, because almost all YouTube sponsors are scams, and we remember Honey was recently exposed as a scam, but this isn't enough to convince me.
We have enough "left-leaning skeptics" and "right-leaning skeptics", even some "neutral skeptics", but barely any skeptics.
The word "skeptic" is poisoned by I will continue to use it. That's intentional.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/09/opinion/trump-beirut-poli...
Essentially that in a state of sectarian politics, everything is political.
> ..."During the course of the dinner, someone mentioned the unusual hailstorms that had pelted Beirut the previous two nights. Everyone offered an explanation for this extreme weather event, before Malcolm, tongue in cheek, asked his guests, “Do you think the Syrians did it?”...
That said, having it as the main tool in the toolbox* is...
Something to be skeptical about?
*Bundled up with another in-your-face one like "personal experience", this also screams "political".. and thus hard to take seriously (particularly when those personal experiences are actually relevant)
Freshness- whatever. You probably already know fresh is somewhat popular, but are you really sure you want to be right but not loved? Be respected by your (fr)enemies maybe? Not even that?
(I'm certainly skeptical about "loved for being right" :)
I won’t use Ground News or Brilliant (I tried it in 2019 and was unimpressed) because they market so aggressively, something doesn’t smell right!
Anything advertising on youtube or podcasts is a negative indicator for me as these platforms have followed the path of talk radio in having a very high ratio of the products that advertise on them being dodgy if not outright scams.
I'm sure there are exceptions that are totally fine, but the pattern follows often enough that if I don't have a pre-existing relationship with a brand before seeing/hearing a youtube or podcast ad for it, it goes into the scam bucket in my head just through the negative advertising platform connection.
https://imgur.com/a/how-to-create-unique-successful-minimali...
Plus, advertising on every Youtube channel makes me suspicious.
In the same breath, he quotes an article about it dousing Newfoundland in microplastics; a broad sweeping conclusion from a laughably flawed study method for the given results. And to be fair, this isn't a diss on the student's effort: scientific study is the holy grail. However, that headline and what was actually done represent two incredibly different things.
So in actuality, perhaps he's just calling his own biases out: The Left leaning articles published in Ground News often attempt to invent consensus by quoting one-off studies. Perhaps his own desire "to be right" or social pressure "to be on the forefront of knowledge" fans the thirst for early conclusions.
I think there is a false sense of everything being left v right. Perhaps there could be a few more spectrums on there e.g environmental, fiscal, social?
However this is all scooting around the fundamental problem that we are all individually responsible for critical thinking - ideally developed through primary and secondary education.
I think the idea is that if you are seeking the truth, and Ground News shows you a story that's being covered exclusively by right or left wing sources, that's their signal that the story could be either a) bullshit, or b) something one side is conveniently ignoring because it runs counter to their agenda. Ultimately it's up to you to you to decide. But, this way, if you hear this story being talked about elsewhere, you've now encountered it and know that it's being almost exclusively covered by one side.
Except this isn't what this guy found. What he found was that right-wing-only stories were invariably lies.
You'd have a point if there was also the same tendency to lying on "the left" (whoever that is supposed to be). Just because you can come up with two sides to an issue doesn't make them equally valid.
There is a truly massive amount of people attempting to prevent criticism of right wing people by constantly deflecting everything with "oh the left wing is just as bad!" and there's an annoying type of person who sees that and believes it.
Like, lies and propaganda are bad for us and our society but we can't get anywhere talking about if everyone has to constantly pretend there are two sides to it.
Deleted Comment
Naturally, this means the platform includes misinformation, political spin, and propaganda—because it’s not designed to tell you whether a story is true. As for the Blindspot feature, it may flag sources with a history of low factual reporting, but ultimately, it’s still up to you to decide how trustworthy any given coverage is.
The vast majority of the time it's used to justify either lying or repeating lies.
What exactly is the use of a website apparently designed to give equal weight to lies and facts? How does that benefit anyone?
The world doesn't need yet another journalism-related resource that repeats what other people say instead of attempting to actually find the truth. But doing the former is massively cheaper and easier than the latter.