Ground News Founder Harleen Kaur on Addressing Media Bias

In this interview Kaur reveals the quotwhyquot behind Ground News examines media bias and discusses the benefits of presenting an aggregated view of coverage on specific news eventsPrince Talk about the origin of Ground News Your background is in space engineering Why the move to news Kaur From my background in space I started working at a mobile app company that shares soccer scores The app already had 10 million users getting their scores each day and it really fascinated me amp8212 coming from an industrial life where so much capital expenditure was required to make an impact In software you can make an impact with a very low expenditureDespite all the technology available people find it very difficult to understand what39s going on with the news what39s news and what39s not I want to create a product where people can sift through and very quickly understand news as a journalist like yourself would do giving them the tools to be able to understand what39s really going onPrince One of the biggest biases in news is story selection which stories are covered versus which never make it to print How does your platform account for this type of biasKaur It39s going to sound a bit silly but we discovered this by accident When we started mapping the sources to the biases we were totally shocked by the absence of reporting on a lot of topics by either side amp8212 not even talking about charged topics like climate change I39m looking at heavy rains in Rwanda and most of the sources covering it lean left because the right doesn39t want to be associated with the implications of the heavy floods happeningThen there are stories on the right as well Just popping up on my feed now there is quotPolice shoot suspect stabber in Belgiumquot and that is mainly covered by the right and not the left There is this quotpick and choosequot on what people decide to cover on each end of the spectrumamp8230 If people rely on a single side of the spectrum you don39t see what39s happening on the other sidePrince When labeling a given news source as quotrightquot or quotleftquot how do you account for publications that don39t fit neatly into these boxes For example Fox News is labeled quotrightquot and The Washington Post as quotleaning leftquot Yet many commentators at Fox News are far more skeptical of interventionist foreign policy than many at the Washington Post amp8212 and thus are arguably to the left of Washington Post commentators Kaur The only way we can do it is by addressing it on a pertopic or pernews event basis amp8212 and seeing how each particular topic has been covered by a particular outlet This is part of the Ground News 20 version we39re working on For example within Fox News how does a particular topic get covered Is there bias in the sense that we can39t put a blanket cover saying Fox is always on the right There is work to be done and it will be even more powerful than what we39re showing right now which is a blanket left or rightPrince One of Ground News39 most interesting and important features is the geographic aspect where one can see how stories are covered in certain parts of the world versus other parts Would you share some examples Kaur Being based in Canada an example would be how Huawei is covered in Canada versus the United States mainland China and Hong Kong Another is the Iranian plane crash last month and how it was covered differently in Canada because unfortunately many Canadians died in the crash Sitting in the West we don39t often get to see how the Iranian media covers what39s happening and how they perceive the newsAnother interesting one for me was in Russia when it came to the opposition leader Navalny For some media outlets it was that he fell ill suddenly and in some parts of the world amp8212 for example in Canada amp8212 it was covered as if he were poisoned In parts of Europe it was covered that he had an allergic reaction It39s interesting and that shows you how very quickly these countries align in terms of their foreign policy with RussiaPrince What are the other big advantages of Ground News relative to other news aggregators such as Read Across the Aisle that aim to address media biasKaur When you go to Google and type in quotmoviesquot you see Rotten Tomatoes Metacritic IMDB etcetera We want to become a single destination for news I39m pretty proud to say that we actually have more stories from across the world than Google News So one is the number of sources The second is the variety of sources from the farright to the farleft We would like to show extreme perspectivesAnd another one is the variety of content that you can follow We have over 150000 topics so you can follow anything from the Trump impeachment to dreadlocks You can follow news stories You can follow interests We want to be the destination of news where people have all the tools to dig deeper if they want toDon39t stop now Stay in the know with critical commentary on media news coverage from Erich Prince and News on the RecordClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNetamp160

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Ground News Founder Harleen Kaur on Addressing Media Bias

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Erich J. Prince

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