Equipping individuals with knowledge and empathy to engage in productive dialogue.
With so many media outlets in the world today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find unbiased news, if not distinguish fact from fiction. News consumers’ reliance on social media, algorithms and preferred media outlets often ends up reinforcing opinions rather than helping develop independent, unbiased views.
And while 78 percent of Americans said that “it is never acceptable for a news organization to favor one political party over others when reporting the news,” according to the Pew Research Center, bias has seeped into the majority of news outlets, making it increasingly difficult for consumers to receive news that is nonpartisan.
But there are a growing number of platforms that want to help people understand media bias and improve their news consumption habits.
Take, for example, Kamy Akhavan, a former CEO of ProCon who has dedicated much of his career to promoting civil communication and improving civic education. Akhavan formed ProCon to reflect his passions while delivering non-biased information through “beneficial confusion,” a technique that offered opposing viewpoints on a wide range of political, social and policy issues so readers could “engage in evaluative thinking to formulate their own views,” he explained.
“The goal is not to persuade but rather to educate,” he said. “The goal is to let the reader come to their own conclusions and judge for themselves what they want to do with that information.”