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01-09-2012, 09:20 AM
I came up with a simple way to combat media bias but I need your help, feedback and ideas.

In order to use the free market to punish biased media, I propose to create an index or a score which can be given to each newspaper or tv channel or any other type of media. The higher the score, the more bias (or the less... or a percentage, whatever is better). This score can then be divulged via Wikipedia for instance. It can help us when debating the media, it can also help some good folks who still trust the media to find something better.
Imagine having something like this result:

Media bias – higher number mean less objectivity (the following numbers are made up)
- CNN: 10
- FOX: 25
- Al Jazeera: 2

Fox would need to stop saying “Fair and balanced”, CNN would pale if compared to some local news outlets. Sure, a score can’t kill media outlet! But it can induce some competition based on objectivity, maybe for some smaller publications who want to set themselves apart.

What could the rules be? Here are some examples:
- Every adjective associated with a person increases the score (e.g. “magnificent” Ron Paul or “isolationist” Ron Paul are both equally biased)
- This one needs tweaking: If the frequency something is discussed is not in relation with measurable numbers (e.g. Paul Polling at 25% is discussed only 10% of the time while someone polling at 5% is mentioned 40% of the time)
- Every article mentioning facts without source or mentioning facts which turn out to be false massively increases the bias score
- ...

One crucial point: it needs to be open (published on the Wikipedia or something similar), simple and repeatable, so that anyone can manually look at an article / newspaper and get to the same identical score.
I would assume the scoring system can improve in time (e.g. bias index v1, bias index v.2) and there could be many for different things (e.g. article bias index, newspaper bias index (a sum of all article biases)).

Do you think something like this is feasible? What could some rules be? Come on, we have experience with media bias :p