David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research, says people aren’t getting exposed to fake news and articles of mis- or disinformation through algorithms, but rather through the choices editors are making when they report the news.
“A lot of the stuff we’ve seen as we started taking a deep dive into mainstream media is that it produced a lot of things that are factually correct, generally factually correct,” he says. “But if you look at the choices about what topics and subtopics to cover, and you look at the choices they make about how to frame them, you can see that can lead people to be misinformed, to be confused about the state of the world. On one hand, you have this question about whether or not people trust (mainstream media), and I think implicitly they do, even though they say they don’t. And on the other hand, it’s super interesting to see that what they should be concerned about, whether or not they are ultimately informed about what’s important, I think is an open question.”
Rothschild is also part of the team behind the Media Bias Detector project, which utilizes artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor what publishers decide to cover, including the tone and perception of political leaning in that coverage.
Rothschild points to the ubiquity, in previous decades, of people watching the nightly news on TV or picking up newspapers, both of which bundled news stories together.
But, with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, many newsrooms were forced to work faster in order to stay ahead of the story.
“That’s an important shift,” Rothschild says. “Ultimately, we can’t answer right and wrong and bias in a way that I think a lot of people want us to. Because most things do not have a ground truth. There is no right answer to how many articles or how many segments mainstream news should have done on questions about Biden’s age. There is no ground truth to the framing and narratives that should’ve been constructed in the immediate aftermath of an assassination attempt on the Republican nominee.”
Media Bias Detector seeks to do help audiences understand the dramatic amount of choice that dominates what is in the mainstream news.
“We can show that, on any given day, the difference in various publications’ choice in what topics and subtopics to cover,” Rothschild says. “God did not decree what the news is, the editors choose what the news is, and that weighs heavily on what we understand the world to be.”
David Rothschild, an economist at Microsoft Research, is one of the people behind the Media Bias Detector Project, which “Tracks and classifies the top stories published by a collection of prominent publishers spanning the political spectrum in close to real time.”
