I've already described media bias. Now, let's say that you want to find out what many outlets are saying about the same topic. We can just search Google for all the news, right?
The first problem is that Google mostly reports liberal sources by default. They have the conservative sources because they crawl the whole Internet. They just usually don't show them unless you look for them by name or specific, key words. Given their influence, that by itself might contribute to a worldwide, liberal bias or stifle debate on many topics. Can we just make our own search engine that shows what everyone is saying?
Here's a short video of how search engines work. Not only do I not have those kind of resources: most search companies discarded their private indexes long ago to use Google and Bing behind the scenes. Until alternatives improve, hosting my own engine would require I have copies of all articles my users are looking for from all news sites. Instead, I'll try to cobble something together priced similar to Netflix.
The first, free option is manually searching DuckDuckGo, Google, or Bing for specific, news sources. You can use the site operator (site:domain.com) to restrict the search to only that one site. We could take a list of sites from different parts of the political spectrum, do a search for one, then another, and so on. Eventually, we have many tabs full of search results. That works but is annoying.
The second option is to automate that with search API's (SERP's). A search API is a service that takes a query from your program, runs the search for you against a search engine, and returns the results to your program in a cleanly-formatted way. They charge a prepaid or monthly fee for a specific number of searches. Here's a list of them.
With automated search, one can then write an app that makes it easy to search many sites at once. As few or as many as we like. Then, integrate the results.
My prototype is a simple program that runs your search against whatever search engines you want using a SERP API. When using it, you enter the search terms along with your news sources. You have some options for news sources:
Every source in every search uses a seperate request on the paid API. The specific number of sources is partly to save you money on requests. You can always look up specific sources by hand on their web sites or using 'site:' operator in a free engine, like Google.
The other thing that's hard to figure out is how to display the results. It's just going to be a pile of titles and links from Google with no description. The results come in up to three categories: left, center, and right. If it's one source, we just display the results. What about multiple or all sides?
My main approach is using three columns, one for each political leaning. Within columns, the app originally displayed one source after another, showing all of each's links under its heading. The newer style, alternating sources, alternates results from each source working from most to least relevant. Users might see all the major views right from the beginning.
I have a sample, results page here. It shows what you get when you search "all" sides for "Trump Iran" (contentious topic). Again, it's for articles within 30 days of that search. I've limited it to N sources. What you see is what everyone was saying that month about a fairly, chaotic situation.
Search engines are currently too liberal to see other views. They're too hard to build. We can use third-party, search API's to pull search results from sites all over the spectrum on any topic. My prototype shows results in columns for left, center, and right. In the future, I hope to make it a free, open-source app that works with multiple, search providers.
(License: This prototype is licensed under the Polyform Non-Commercial License, which is easy to read. You can download it, change it, share it with your changes, do research, critique it, observe your faith... anything but sell it. If you want it commercial, just ask and I'll made it reasonable.)