Idea: HotOrNot for Media Bias

[mmodahl]

With all the discussion of NPR and media bias this week, I had the idea last night to create a website where people could rate anonymized paragraphs of journalism on a scale from Liberal to Conservative. You'd see only a paragraph of national or international or business news with no information as to the news source or authorship and be able to click on a Likert scale from Liberal to none to Conservative. The user could submit their appraisal of the paragraph's media bias.

The collected data could be analyzed to determine general leanings of articles, authors, and news sources across subject or time.

In this political minefield, the app would probably attract people willing to spend the time to determine where the paragraph came from before ranking it in order to artificially paint sources in a certain way and you could always add features to limit this behavior: timers, searches for people only ranking paragraphs that come from a single news source, etc..

I've got to give this idea away or I'm not going do anything for the projects I need to work on today.