SEPTEMBER 10, 2008

You Can Block Spin, But What About Spam?

Some interesting news flashed across my Google Reader screen this morning: SpinSpotter, a Firefox add-on that uses a series of algorithms to detect “spin” in news stories, has gone live.

According to the BusinessWeek article, SpinSpotter’s basic features include functionality to detect and flag violations of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.  In addition to that, the program will rely heavily on input from its users, who can flag specific instances of bias and spin that may not be detectable by the program. Those individual flags will be incorporated back into the program itself, so it has the capability to adapt to new kinds of spin.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to check out the program for myself, but reading the interview with company officials, a few red flags pop out at me. First, there’s an assumption that media bias is a two-sided affair - that if there’s bias, it’s against Republicans or Democrats - when in reality, American political opinion is much more multifaceted than the old left-right continuum would suggest.

My other issue, though, is a little more substantive. I believe strongly in the power of an adversarial press - where people, reporters, and companies with different opinions can contribute their points of view. Certainly there must be ground rules, and if a journalist is merely repeating the talking points of a political party then he or she deserves to be ignored. But part of the marketplace of ideas is a vibrant press, filled with different points of view, that allows readers to decide what’s relevant and what’s not.

An adversarial press relies on diversity of outlets - something that has been in short supply over the past 50 years, when most cities have only one daily paper and three television stations to supply the news. But the internet and social media have changed that by allowing the kind of diversity of opinion in the press that existed before the big media conglomerates. To gut that diversity by using an automated spin remover seems to me to be missing the point of social media entirely - that it’s supposed to be about individual opinions.

Beyond that, there’s very little evidence to suggest that Americans are interested in bias-free news. For instance, a Rasmussen poll shows that 87% of Fox News viewers plan to vote for John McCain in the upcoming elections, while Barack Obama holds smaller majorities of CNN and MSNBC viewers. It’s clear that in this case, we’re selecting the media outlets that we think best fit our views. It’s no different in newspaper-land: conservatives here in DC read the Times, everyone else reads the Post. 

While SpinSpotter’s efforts are certainly noble, ultimately I think it’s a lost cause. Even if we were interested in reading non-biased news, the nature of bias is so complicated that it seems impossible to truly remove it.