NewsCube: delivering multiple aspects of news to mitigate media bias

The bias in the news media is an inherent flaw of the news 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. It is very difficult, if not impossible, for readers to have penetrating views on realities against such bias. This paper presents NewsCube, a novel Internet news service aiming at mitigating the effect of media bias. NewsCube automatically creates and promptly provides readers with multiple classified viewpoints on a news event of interest. As such, it effectively helps readers understand a fact from a plural of viewpoints and formulate their own, more balanced viewpoints. While media bias problem has been studied extensively in communications and social sciences, our work is the first to develop a news service as a solution and study its effect. We discuss the effect of the service through various user studies.

[1]  M. Aldenderfer.  Cluster Analysis , 1984 .

[2]  Steven Kull,et al.  Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War , 2003 .

[3]  Yiming Yang,et al.  Topic Detection and Tracking Pilot Study Final Report , 1998 .

[4]  Robert M. Entman,et al.  Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm , 1993 .

[5]  Dragomir R. Radev,et al.  NewsInEssence: summarizing online news topics , 2005, Commun. ACM.

[6]  Michael Gamon,et al.  BLEWS: Using Blogs to Provide Context for News Articles , 2008, ICWSM.

[7]  Mattias Polborn,et al.  Political Polarization and the Electoral Effects of Media Bias , 2006, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[8]  June Woong Rhee,et al.  Framing the health care reform campaign of 1993-1994: News frame, interpretation, and public opinion change , 1997 .

[9]  Wei-Ying Ma,et al.  Detecting web page structure for adaptive viewing on small form factor devices , 2003, WWW '03.

[10]  P. Sopp.  Cluster analysis. , 1996, Veterinary immunology and immunopathology.

[11]  Dean S. Karlan,et al.  Does the Media Matter? A Field Experiment Measuring the Effect of Newspapers on Voting Behavior and Political Opinions , 2006 .

[12]  Christopher Cieri,et al.  Quality Control in Large Annotation Projects Involving Multiple Judges: The Case of the TDT Corpora , 2000, LREC.

[13]  Robert W. McChesney,et al.  Theses on media deregulation , 2003 .

[14]  Xiaojun Wan,et al.  CollabSum: exploiting multiple document clustering for collaborative single document summarizations , 2007, SIGIR.

[15]  Aniket Kittur,et al.  He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia , 2007, CHI.

[16]  Tim Groseclose,et al.  A Measure of Media Bias , 2005 .

[17]  Fabrizio Sebastiani,et al.  Machine learning in automated text categorization , 2001, CSUR.

[18]  C. T. Salmon.  Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media , 1989 .

[19]  James W. Dearing,et al.  Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World , 2002 .

[20]  E. Herman,et al.  The Propaganda Model: a retrospective , 2000 .

[21]  D. P. Baron,et al.  Persistent Media Bias , 2004 .

[22]  George Karypis,et al.  A Comparison of Document Clustering Techniques , 2000 .

[23]  Jr. James W.Tankard.  The Empirical Approach to the Study of Media Framing , 2001 .