It’s all too common in news articles to have to sift through the personal opinions, selective perspectives, and emotionally-charged language. Click-bait articles can take away from the facts of a story, making it hard to find a neutral source. Even the major traditional news outlets can become guilty of leaning too far to the left or right.
Although it may be hard to find, neutral news sources do exist. This guide will help you understand how to find credible sources, and how to find them quickly without it taking up too much of your time.
What Are Neutral News Sources?
In order to find neutral news sources, we first need to establish exactly what they are. Another term for a neutral news source is unbiased news. Here are a few key elements that make up a neutral news source:
- All sides of a story are covered equally within an article.
- All facts of a story are covered within an article.
- The title is not intended to provoke a specific emotion in its readers (i.e. rage-bait).
- The source covering the news story does not have a track record of favoring specific political perspectives.
- There is no “hidden agenda” within the article. In other words, it does not read as being persuasive, rather than factual.
- The sources used within the article are credible.
Neutral news sources intend to share the facts of a story without pushing the readers towards a specific opinion. In some cases, it could be easy to recognize bias in articles. In other cases, the bias comes through subtleties of language used that make it hard to detect.
Removing Bias from News
The problem with neutral news sources is that they can be hard to find. Traditional news outlets have further reach and access when it comes to reporting on current events. But, with their reports can come unwanted bias.
Media bias checkers allow readers to put articles from major news outlets through an AI-powered tool to remove bias. This allows you to read the most easily-accessible news stories without having to read all the fluff that gets added in alongside the facts. Using this type of unbiased news saves significant time compared to the time it takes to find sites you deem the most trustworthy. With a media bias tool, readers can immediately understand the full scope of what makes any news article bias or unbiased, giving them a broader range of sources to read without having to worry about whether they deem it trustworthy.
Can I Trust a News Source That Claims It’s Unbiased?
Trust in the news is becoming harder and harder to come by. Social media platforms, YouTube, blog sites like Medium and Substack, and traditional news outlets let anyone share news. But, this can add a lot of sources that are hard to trust, and even harder to sift through.
For a news source to be trust neutral, it must be able to identify and share what specific language is being used in articles that include bias. With AI, human readers can see what makes an article biased from a technical standpoint. Artificial intelligence brings a formulaic approach to identifying articles compared to a human editor, who may miss small subtleties of bias or skip identifying bias that aligns with their own. The biggest benefit of an AI-powered tool reviewing for bias is that they did not write the original news article. Instead, they merely correct human bias to produce a version that contains only true facts.