Your Balanced Media Diet explores media consumption habits by showing you how your preferences fit within the overall news media landscape — and interrogating if you should consider adding variety to your media diet or include a news source with a different profile. It was designed as part of Science Gallery Dublin's exhibition BIAS: BUILT THIS WAY, an interactive, thought-provoking exploration of preferences, prejudices and digital equity. Your Balanced Media Diet is a collaboration between myself and Brendan Spillane, a Post-doctoral Researcher in the ADAPT Centre in the School of Computer Science and Statistics in Trinity College Dublin.
What’s the recipe for a biased article? Measuring bias within the media is an incredibly nuanced and difficult process. While factuality can be clearly measured, the underlying and often unconscious political leaning, values and motivations of media outlets can be trickier to pin down conclusively. This is especially true when considering that these media companies consist of teams of editors, writers, reporters and presenters, who each bring their own biases to the table. It should also be noted that any human judgement of bias is by its very nature subjective, and each of us have our own biases that affect our judgement. The recipes in the cookbook and foods in the fridge represent a variety of news media sources. The categorisations are gathered from Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC), an American website founded in 2015 as a collaborative effort to rate news media sources based on factual accuracy and political bias, that follows best practices within the discipline.
What’s the recipe for a biased article? Measuring bias within the media is an incredibly nuanced and difficult process. While factuality can be clearly measured, the underlying and often unconscious political leaning, values and motivations of media outlets can be trickier to pin down conclusively. This is especially true when considering that these media companies consist of teams of editors, writers, reporters and presenters, who each bring their own biases to the table. It should also be noted that any human judgement of bias is by its very nature subjective, and each of us have our own biases that affect our judgement. The recipes in the cookbook and foods in the fridge represent a variety of news media sources. The categorisations are gathered from Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC), an American website founded in 2015 as a collaborative effort to rate news media sources based on factual accuracy and political bias, that follows best practices within the discipline.
Visitors are invited to use their phone to explore the fridge – each item in it representing a different common news media source – so that you can see the variation in your diet and to see if your diet is clustered around a specific shelf or part of the fridge. By opening your camera smartphone and directing it towards the QR code on the food item, you are be redirected to the news article it represents.
Left Biased = High sugars and sweets
Left-Centre Biased = Fruit and vegetables
Least Biased = Proteins
Right-Centre Biased = Dairy products
Right Biased = Fats and spreads
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When we ask ourselves where we get our own news from, many of us find ourselves answering “from social media”. But when we go one step further and interrogate where these news sources actually come from, we may find ourselves less confident in our responses. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat are not news agencies themselves, nor do they hire reporters. They are web platforms that allow news media outlets to post their own content to reach their target audience. While we may trust the app that served us the story, we should be wary that they are not the same hands that made it.
We should also be aware that we do not always get to choose what news stories served to us. The obscured methods by which social media algorithms filter our news feeds results in users only seeing what the system believes they wish to engage with, or have a history of clicking. These filter bubbles present us with a preprocessed version of the news.
