“The Truth About Obamacare”
“What Planned Parenthood Really Does”
Your reaction to these headlines is probably very different depending on 1) Your worldview and 2) which news outlet published it.
If you were liberal and saw “The Truth About Obamacare”, published by liberal outlet Mother Jones, you’d likely assume that the article detailed how Obamacare has helped so many poor people get insurance. You might click on the article, get reinforced in your view of Obamacare, and feel good that your side was winning.
If you were liberal and saw “The Truth About Obamacare”, published by conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation, you’d likely assume that the article was attacking Obamacare and calling the individual mandate unconstitutional. You probably wouldn’t click on it, and if you did, you’d likely be reading it with a “ahh, so this is what those idiot conservatives think” bias.
I find myself guilty of this all the time. It’s human. No matter how open minded you think you are, it’s a lot more comfortable to listen to people agree with you than challenge you. It’s scary and hard to step outside the echo chamber.
The public conversation used to be, “these are the facts, we just disagree on what to do with these facts”. The internet and the echo chambers it’s created have devolved the conversation into “we don’t even agree on the facts”. No wonder the country seems more divided than ever.
Alot has been written about the danger of echo chambers in the past year, but not much has been done about it, so I decided to try something.
I thought about how orchestras were able to hire better musicians by having them audition behind a curtain, and thus allow the people on the hiring committee to focus purely on the sound coming out of the instrument, and not get biased by the musician’s age, bodyweight, gender, or race and I realized that the same principle could be applied to news consumption.
So I created a news site that aggregates articles from some of the most respected liberal, conservative, libertarian and democratic-socialist publications on the internet and displays these articles to you without showing you the source. So now when you see “The Truth About Obamacare”, you can click on the article without any preconceived bias for or against whoever published it.