Your Balanced Media Diet explores how individual news preferences sit within the wider media landscape — and whether greater variety might lead to a more balanced media diet. Designed as part of Science Gallery Dublin’s exhibition BIAS: Built This Way, the project invites visitors to reflect on bias, preference, and digital equity.
The installation was developed in collaboration with Brendan Spillane, Post-doctoral Researcher at the ADAPT Centre, Trinity College Dublin.
What’s the recipe for a biased article?
Bias in media is difficult to measure. While factual accuracy can be assessed, political leaning, values, and motivation are often subtle, distributed across editorial teams, and shaped by human subjectivity — including our own.
Your Balanced Media Diet visualises these complexities through food. Recipes in the cookbook and items in the fridge represent different news media sources, categorised using data from Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC), a collaborative project that evaluates outlets based on factual accuracy and political bias.
What’s the recipe for a biased article?
Bias in media is difficult to measure. While factual accuracy can be assessed, political leaning, values, and motivation are often subtle, distributed across editorial teams, and shaped by human subjectivity — including our own.
Your Balanced Media Diet visualises these complexities through food. Recipes in the cookbook and items in the fridge represent different news media sources, categorised using data from Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC), a collaborative project that evaluates outlets based on factual accuracy and political bias.
Visitors use their phones to explore the fridge, where each food item represents a common news source. Scanning a QR code reveals a corresponding article, allowing visitors to see patterns in their consumption — whether their diet clusters around a particular shelf, category, or bias profile.
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 asked where we get our news, many of us answer “social media.” Yet platforms like Facebook or Instagram are not news organisations — they don’t write stories or employ reporters. They are distribution systems, optimised for engagement rather than context.
The algorithms that filter these feeds shape what we see, often reinforcing existing preferences. These filter bubbles present a pre-processed version of the news — familiar, comfortable, and rarely challenging.
Your Balanced Media Diet invites visitors to step outside that feed, and consider what a more intentional media diet might look like.
