I'm a little bit of a news junkie - always have been. And like a lot of people, I've been intensely bothered by the polarization of news media in the US, especially when it comes to government and politics. Call the spectrum whatever you want - left / right, democrat / republican, socialist / conservative, blue / red - the gap is widening, the language turning more incendiary, and logical, civilized, fact-based discourse has been the unfortunate victim. With apologies to Aaron Sorkin, more and more it seems, we agree on less and less.

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All of this has happened in parallel to a transformation in how news is consumed - algorithm-powered digital platforms deliver increasingly bite-sized, personalized content to a time-starved attention-deficit audience that is vaguely aware they are being kept in a bubble, but don't know (or care) about breaking out of it. When content virality and advertising dollars drive what shows up in YOUR news, the sheer complexity of your bias-drivers is often impossible to understand, much less mentally correct for.

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So I am building bluewhitered.org to, not cut out the noise, but to organize the cacophony. The basis of it being that if we know from historical performance whether a particular news source is usually left or right biased, we can mentally correct for how seriously to take the message, and how to read into the conclusions being drawn or implied. That is what the blue, white, red columns do - put the news sources in context, using data from independent authorities like allsides.com and mediabiasfactcheck.com. Raw news content is pulled from Webhose.io and entities / topics are extracted using TextRazor. The site is built in PHP and Javascript with a MySQL backend.

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There is a ton left to do - I've barely scratched the surface of my vision so far. Some really interesting dynamic data viz stuff is in the pipeline, as are ways of showing how different sides are covering the same topic. Stay tuned.