News App Aggregator Takes Aim At Media Bias

Aside from wire services provided by services like Thomson Reuters and the Associated Press, it can be difficult to ferret out unbiased news sources in the age of always-on, in-demand media. Americans are aware that news services like Fox News and Breitbart tend to lean to the right, while organizations like the Washington Post tend to lean towards liberal centrism given its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos.

In the UK, the Telegraph has a reputation for leaning to the right – former conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson once served as the paper’s editor and the publication is jokingly referred to as the “Torygraph” by its detractors for that reason. SKY News, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, has a similar reputation. 

And even though 58% of adults in the United States claim they have trust in the information they consume, this figure represents the smallest percentage of respondents who indicate this level of trust over the past five years, according to Pew Research’s survey into media bias. 

To increase these levels of trust, the folks at NT CONNECT, an international technology developer, built a media aggregator product that provides readers an insight into news publications’ skew to the right, left, or center called NOOZ.ai. 

“Biased reporting is a major concern in today’s society. Misinformation is the most commonly misused buzzword. But the reality is that language itself can be used to manipulate and persuade the casual reader.  By objectively analyzing language we avoid the subjective bias found in other approaches,” said Garry Paxinos, CTO at NT CONNECT.

“As opposed to subjectively labeling misinformation, our approach is to illuminate how one can be manipulated with exaggerated headlines, revision history, and text of articles,” Paxinos added.

Readers interested in uncovering an unbiased view of their news universe can download the app, which is now available on iOS and Android devices for free. 

As its name suggests, NOOZ.ai utilizes AI-powered language analysis meant to decipher the language used in news publications to uncover inherent bias to provide readers with a heads-up about the way a publication leans before they dive-in. The way the service works is constructed around four key pillars: 

• Opinion Analysis – Which helps readers determine the presence of personal feelings, views, beliefs, or judgments in a journalist’s writing. 

• Sentiment Analysis to help readers gauge the journalist’s positivity (sympathy or support) or negativity (antagonism and opposition) to the general news content or the specific topic they write about. 

• Propaganda Analysis which detects potential disinformation by identifying the usage of up to 18 possible persuasion techniques. 

• Revision Analysis so that readers can investigate the evolution of a news story and its manipulation of opinion and sentiment over time.

As readers scroll through news items, they will note that each one lists stories alongside a score that positions each piece on a range from 0 to 100 both in terms of Opinion and Sentiment as well as keeping track of post-publication edits made by the news outlet to articles after they’ve gone live.

This article includes a client of an Espacio portfolio company