NewsCube: delivering multiple aspects of news to mitigate media bias

ABSTRACT

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.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.2 Social Issues

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
aspect-level browsing, media bias, news, news distribution service