New site offers way to measure online political bias

If people are using blogs and Web sites more than ever to collect news, should the Web also tell them how trustworthy that information is?

That’s one of the premises used at Skewz.com, a site that has users analyze and rate the political bias of the source information, whether from a mainstream news site or a political blog.

You can be sure posts at huffingtonpost.com are liberal, while posts at littlegreenfootballs.com will lean heavily conservative.

Skewz, just launched by entrepreneur Vipul Vyas a month ago, tries to cover the rest of the vast Web political arena. It’s got more than 1,000 registered users and a nifty set of Web 2.0 tools to help them score or assign skewing values to things they consider worth reading.

The main page opens into a half-blue, half-red divided display. Stories on the left have been those generally assigned a liberal media bias, and those on the right are on the other side of the spectrum.

Vyas believes that feedback and group input deliver a useful mob wisdom. Users can read the individual articles and then decide where they belong on the bias spectrum. Readers can assign absolutely no bias, too – marking them as neutral.

He also lets anyone submit any article he or she considers worth reading. “People do the self-policing. A lot of times they use the inappropriate flag to remove stories not appropriate to Skewz,” Vyas said.

Like many sites, Skewz allows all sorts of grouping of articles: by most popular, most recent, and even by most narrow or broad bias categorization. In fact, after creating a free account, the user can choose a category of reading material – either stories that are neutral or articles that can be considered heavily liberal or conservative.

Whether people read only what they want to read or not, Vyas said Skewz simply stands aside and lets the community decide how articles are received and interpreted. He said he sees interest among users falling into two types: those who want to call out what they believe is bias in reporting or commentary, and those who want to initiate discussion on a relevant political topic.

“When people see bias in a newspaper, they can send a letter to the editor and hope it gets published. Skewz is a mechanism that gives them another option. They can call out a story as being biased when it asserts to be objective.

“They can also use it to influence where they want the dialogue to be focused.”

Because Skewz gathers information across the total number of articles posted and reviewed, the site delivers some interesting aggregate results.

One is “linked” stories that are similar or nearly identical, giving readers a chance to compare the reactions of Skewz users. Last month’s news story covering New York Sen. Hillary Clinton’s reaction to Barack Obama’s support for the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is one such example, Vyas said.

Skewz showed two nearly identical versions of the same story, but one version was skewed by users as more liberal, the other more conservative. The “liberal” story came from the International Herald Tribune; the “conservative” one from Urgentmedia.com.

Vyas said the takeaway lesson is that bias is in the eye of the beholder; sometimes the messenger or the news source always will be seen as biased, like it or not.

Vyas said one way the site can generate revenue is to develop something like individual recommendations for any user, based on his or her collective Skewz ratings. If a person tends to approve articles about green technology, Skewz could be a matchmaker and suggest groups or non-government organizations that person would want to help or support, he said.

One criticism heard at Skewz by people who oppose its system of rankings is that politics and public policy are more complicated than a simple left-right color scheme. Vyas agrees in principle with that argument.

“But in the end, that (two-sided approach) is the framework used by the polity to address these issues. We have a two-party system, by and large. We have two brokers of power and they generally negotiate in that framework.

“So that is the way people can relate to general discussion about politics. That’s the sad truth,” he said.