Online Watchdog Sniffs for Media Bias

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

 http://www.isett.com

John Atcheson, left, and Todd Herman, creators of SpinSpotter.

By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA
Published: October 15, 2008
 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/16/arts/television/16spin.html?ref=technology
If you don’t trust the news media, what are your options? You can fume about bias, wonder what you’re missing and suppress the urge to throw things. Or ignore some sources and turn to those whose slant you like.
But what if there were a device that objectively flagged questionable elements in online news articles, poking and parsing words and phrases, and letting you contribute your own critiques? Well, a Seattle company called SpinSpotter has produced a piece of software — a free download that works within a Web browser — that tries to do just that.
As its creators acknowledge, it still has to overcome some daunting technical and human barriers to live up to its lofty aims. (Its home page at spinspotter.com proclaims, “Behold the epiphany of unfiltered news.”) But a month into its release in a test version that is only available for the Mozilla Firefox browser — an Internet Explorer version is expected in a few weeks — it gives an interesting peek at where the future of truth-squadding may lie.
Any attempt to judge news articles could rely on experts, a broad audience of readers or a set of formulas. SpinSpotter combines all three, but for now the formulas are still being adjusted, the audience is not yet big enough, and it remains to be seen how unbiased or effective the experts are. SpinSpotter grew out of a longstanding obsession of Todd Herman, a conservative former talk-radio host who is the company’s chief product officer. “I thought of this 10 years ago,” he said. “The things I’d see in mainstream media drove me crazy.”
The chief executive officer, John Atcheson, is politically liberal, and he and Mr. Herman say they tend to balance each other out. “We don’t delude ourselves into thinking we’re going to eliminate spin, and that’s not even our objective,” said Mr. Atcheson, who has been an executive of several technology companies. “We just want it to be transparent, above the surface.”
With the SpinSpotter plug-in, anyone can call up a news article, insert red flags over offending passages and, in a pop-up box, explain the perceived problems and suggest edits. Another reader seeing the same article will also see those flags, can comment on them and, crucially, can vote on whether the offense is serious or not.
In addition a panel of journalism graduate students at the University of Missouri picks through a random sampling of articles, and critiques the critiques. That is supposed to help guard against a group with a particular bias “gaming” the system, but it is not yet clear how well that will work.
Each individual user earns a “trust rating,” based on other readers’ votes, the judgment of the graduate students and how often they agree with other users who are highly trusted. Users will not know their ratings, but comments posted by those with the highest scores will predominate.
SpinSpotter has an advisory board of journalists and journalism professors who helped devise the company’s standards. They have varying political stripes, and include some well-known writers like Jonah Goldberg of the National Review and Brooke Allen of The Nation.
The company has also devised algorithms that search for potential fudge phrases like “critics say,” and that learn from users which expressions are most often censured.
“The algorithm approach also has serious limits, which is why the human element is essential,” Mr. Herman said. “There is no algorithm that can interpret language with anywhere near the sophistication of a reader.”
One problem with the “wiki” approach, relying on the self-correcting wisdom of the crowd to reach a rough consensus, is that there needs to be a critical mass of people picking apart each article. And there needs to be some assurance that the crowd, through self-selection, does not have serious collective biases.
SpinSpotter’s creators acknowledge that they are not there yet, though they say it is only a matter of time. (They will not say how many users the software has so far, or how many it needs to be effective.)
In the last month, they say, it has become clear that their limited following is far too small to cover the vast array of online news sources. So starting this week SpinSpotter is focusing primarily on the Web sites of five major news outlets: CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, The New York Times and Yahoo! News.
The software insists that reader objections fit into one of six broad categories: lack of balance, using the reporter’s point of view, using passive voice, using a biased source, disregarding context and selective disclosure. But for now those categories have their own limitations. Some journalistic misdemeanors — citing just one source, or failing to offer supporting evidence for an assertion — do not fit neatly into any of the categories.
One category of complaint, use of passive voice, seems bound to flag phrases — “four people were killed in an accident,” for example — that are far from biased.
“We’re constantly tweaking,” Mr. Herman said. “People are asking us, for example, about creating a category for things that are provably false.”
SpinSpotter has financial backing from a number of venture capitalists, primarily the firm Epic Ventures, who are drawn more by the commercial possibilities than the implications for journalism.
The SpinSpotter site plans to sell ads, but the main hope for revenue lies in selling services.
“Anybody who deals in marketing and communications, a P.R. agency, a corporate marketing office, a political campaign, we can give them information on what phrases are being used out there as spin, or are being perceived as spin, where those phrases are showing up,” Mr. Atcheson said. Press releases, he said, can be scrubbed of phrases that sow doubt.
Which might just point the way toward newer, subtler ways of spinning, not toward the transparency the company advocates. But Mr. Atcheson said he is hopeful about what SpinSpotter can do for news reporting.
“We’ve even talked to some news organizations that are interested in having a version of our service behind the wall,” he said, “so they can prescreen their work.”