Middle Ground

Reading the news is overwhelming in today's day and age, given the rise in fake news and clearly biased media sources, and our aim is to burst the bubbles that many of us find ourselves in. Media-consumers choose to stand behind specific outlets and decide which information they see as “true.” As it has many times in the past, today’s media takes advantage of this reality to forward their agendas.

MiddleGround is a browser extension and accompanying web application that helps news readers ascertain media bias and provides centrist and slightly left/right leaning related news articles to help users make their own educated opinions through a holistic lens.

People increasingly perceive the media as biased and struggle to identify objective news sources. They believe the media continue to have a critical role in maintaining a democracy but are not very positive about how the media are fulfilling that role, which is concerning.

When the media adopt loaded terminology, they help shape public opinion. Mass media frame the details of the story and communicate the social desirability of certain ideas, so users need to be aware of the power they have to exploit stories, and what the repercussions of that are.

Once the user clicks on a news article and want to discern the media bias of the news outlet, they would then click on the MiddleGround extension button on the taskbar. The API that we have used for our product includes a variety of news outlets from across the world, mainly focusing on American and British sources. However, we eliminated all sources that lay on the far right or left to avoid encountering extreme language. We’re also looking to build a functionality that allows a small pop-up to hover around the MiddleGround extension icon, so that users can be reminded that they can refer to our product to get the information that they need. After clicking on the extension button, a pop up appears, where in a legend indicating what R, L, and C stand for, which are right, left, and center respectively. Below that, we have a list of the top 3 (fewer if our databases aren’t able to pull up 3) articles by other news outlets that are related to the one they’re currently reading, which they can click on to read. At the very bottom of the extension pop up is a View More button, which if clicked on, then leads our user to our web application.

Once on our web application, our users have the opportunity to type in any keywords or news events that they're interested in reading more about. After the results are displayed, users have the option of filtering them out by their bias, popularity, or date published. Not only does this allow users to understand how different sides perceive events differently, but they can also assess how events have progressed through time with the time-specific filters.