Posted on 10/20/2008 9:41:38 AM PDT by mlocher
If you don't trust the news media, what options do you have? You can fume about bias or ignore some sources and turn to those whose slant you like.
But what if you had a device that objectively flagged questionable elements in online news articles, poking and parsing words and phrases, and letting you contribute your own critiques?
A company in Seattle called SpinSpotter has produced software -- a free download -- 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 www.spinspotter.com proclaims, "Behold the epiphany of unfiltered news.")
But a month into its release in a test version that is available only 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-patrolling might lie.
SpinSpotter combines three methods of judging news articles: experts, a broad audience of readers and a set of formulas.
How do you know that this isn't that version?
A more germain question is whether the fairness doctrin will require you to have a liberal version and a balanced version on your PC.
Software has been good at exposing the left. Recently someone developed software that detects BS in speeches, how many weasel words, how much is said without actually saying anything. An absolute level could involve the bias of the researcher, so it crunched 150 speeches from this election cycle to set the average level of BS as a zero baseline. Then certain politicians’ scores were extracted. McCain had the lowest level of BS, Obama by far the highest. This should be no surprise, but it’s nice to see it calculated with no point of view.
Biden had a pretty low level, which must be why he keeps saying things that aren’t in the Obama party line.
This software would have a meltdown if it had to scan the MPLS Star & Sickle.
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