Bias Busters

The busy work of cataloguing news in the hope of saving humanity from our conspiratorial online disinformation hell.

One morning in November, I logged on for a Google Meet with AllSides, a company on a crusade to fight bias in the media. Henry Brechter, the editor in chief, is twenty-eight; brown hair tufted out of his Red Sox hat. “We’ll try and go around the different corners of the internet,” he said. The team tossed out recent news items: Zohran Mamdani, the long-shot Democratic Socialist candidate, won New York’s mayoral election; Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, announced that she would not run for reelection; a weapons manufacturer was preparing for a theoretical conflict between China and the United States by testing autonomous drone warships in the Pacific. But before getting into the substance of the stories, everyone felt compelled to tell me about their personal political persuasions.

“I’m from Boston and I have a center bias,” Brechter said. His staff of writers and editors chimed in. Evan Wagner: “I live in DC and I have a lean-left bias.” Beth Hicks: “I’m in Virginia and I’m right-biased.” Emily Allen: “I live in Nashville, I’m originally from Southern California, and I’m left-biased.” AllSides aims to provide “balanced” news: on any given topic, the site delivers a roundup of articles from a range of political perspectives, as interpreted and labeled by the team. Staff members are sought out for variety in terms not only of ideology—employees are quizzed regularly on their political views—but also life experience. Brechter is one of the only staff members with a journalism degree. One staff member is a volunteer firefighter; another is an adjunct English professor. An AllSides editor named Andy Gorel (“center bias”) told me, “What drives our team’s strength is we’re a bunch of normies.”