you may have seen ads for Ground News lately especially if you watch politically-left YouTubers. generally speaking, I like it on a conceptual level, and it's provided me with some additional sourcing in a few articles since it launched.
BUT I HAVE SEVERAL LARGE CONCERNS I'LL NOW PRESENT IN A BULLETEDΒ LIST
- major outlets/papers are simply not there. I challenge you to find anything from the New York Times, one of the largest papers in the world and one that is rated by all three bias watchdogs Ground News says they aggregate their bias ratings from. the closest I could come was this page for NYT.com, a URL which redirects to NYTimes.com. I suspect this is either because NYT is strictly paywalled, or someone put in the wrong URL for NYT back in development and never realized that the redirect meant it wasn't fetching results. but it doesn't really matter why; that alone is a major omission from the media landscape, presenting a skewed view of total coverage (especially when outlets like NYT themselves shape coverage downstream). given that Ground News' major selling point is Blindspot, the tool that theoretically helps you understand what stories have "one-sided" coverage across the entire digital media landscape, this presents a big problem
- whatever algorithm they're using to match stories into topic pages....I just don't think it works! most of what I write every day is aggregated from one or more existing news sources, but looking at the Ground News page for Them as I write this, at least five or six recent articles about news we did not break are listed as the only coverage for that story, while there's a whole other topic page for the same story with a slightly different headline that compiles most of the other big outlets that covered it. again, this creates a false impression of what total coverage of a given topic looks like and makes Blindspot feel useless
- saving the most egregious for last, they are also using fucking "AI" to "assist" with compiling data. "Ground AI" is in beta right now according to the dialogue box on the site, but wow, that doesn't make me feel particularly optimistic about how the rest of these tools were designed! i'm not going to go deeper into why that's fucking awful because thankfully, this is cohost and i don't have to!
for all my carping about how unbiased journalism is fake, I do think it's important to understand how bias actually works and how that affects the creation and consumption of media. if you're curious and engaged with that kind of thing, I personally cannot recommend relying on Ground News to do it for you.
