A Computational Framework for Media Bias Mitigation

Abstract

Bias in the news media is an inherent flaw of the news production process. The bias often causes a sharp increase in political polarization and in the cost of conflict on social issues such as the Iraq war. This article presents NewsCube, a novel Internet news service which aims to mitigate the effect of media bias. NewsCube automatically creates and promptly provides readers with multiple classified views on a news event. As such, it helps readers understand the event from a plurality of views and to formulate their own, more balanced, viewpoints. The media bias problem has been studied extensively in mass communications and social science. This article reviews related mass communication and journalism studies and provides a structured view of the media bias problem and its solution. We propose media bias mitigation as a practical solution and demonstrate it through NewsCube. We evaluate and discuss the effectiveness of NewsCube through various performance studies.