The saying goes that if it’s free, you’re the product. In the artificial intelligence age, I’m starting to wonder what kind of product we are being fashioned into.
A little while ago, I started to notice that other people – always other people, not me, of course – were completely unaware of things that had happened. Missing large chunks of information, their reality was significantly distorted. It was no longer just a matter of having different perspectives on the same thing. We seemed to be living in completely different dimensions, intersecting on only a skeleton of mutually known facts. Obviously, they weren’t reading widely enough.
So I created a version of a US project I’ve found thought-provoking. Ground News compiles the main stories running across the North American media and provides the reader with a visual that illustrates whether the story is being reported evenly across left- to centre- to right-leaning media, or mostly on one end of the spectrum or the other. I instructed Claude AI, an artificial intelligence platform, to create a top-line version for Australia.
I expected it to be a helpful tool to demonstrate how ignorant people were of what was being said outside their echo chambers and algorithmic bubbles. But I didn’t expect that I would be one of those people. Every week since I started it, the scheduled newsletter has shown me something I had completely missed – and often a framing that simply wasn’t present in the outlets I was reading.
Claude and I settled on 14 media outlets to include – I’ve since increased that to 19. On the centre-left, it nominated ABC News, Guardian Australia, The Saturday Paper and Crikey, among others. On the centre-right, the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Australian Financial Review, Sky News and The Australian. It put The Spectator Australia on the hard right, so in recognition of its own degrees, I adjusted the settings to reflect that Crikey and The Saturday Paper mirror its stridency on the hard left.
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age were rated by Claude as centre-left, with the metered paywall reducing how often they can be served up in an internet increasingly served pre-chewed by AI assistants. Of course, all these ratings are debatable, but I didn’t put my finger on the scale except for the adjustments noted. No outlet is rated as dead centre, which I think is fair. The rating assesses the overall lean, rather than softening the general impression on the basis of dissenting voices published.
Once the machine took into account paywalls, the preponderance of free media on the left and hard paywalls on the right significantly reduced consumption of right-leaning media, leading to a left skew reported on each edition produced.
I also told Claude to include social media, since people now tend to pick up news from mainstream outlets through these channels. The discussion that surrounds issues affects the way those items are processed and becomes part of what an individual will regard as “known facts”, or “general opinion”.
It rated X as moderately right-leaning, based on the fact that Musk has tinkered with the algorithm to give it a right tilt, and Facebook as slightly right-leaning among active political users. TikTok and Instagram are left-leaning, along with the discussion forum Reddit. BlueSky is strongly left-leaning, it says, noting that “Australian political journalists, ABC reporters and Greens-aligned voices are disproportionately represented”. Substack is the only platform that got rated as balanced, though that is separated by discipline. “Economics and policy newsletters lean right-to-libertarian,” Claude observed. “Political and social commentary leans left.”
The findings have consistently told me something I did not know. In one edition, I was surprised to see there was a lot of media and social coverage of “the $125 per week room in Adelaide”, from an Anglicare report that found there only one property in reach in Adelaide for someone on the JobSeeker allowance. It had completely passed me by. There’s also a lot of climate anxiety and climate justice content on social media. It’s not even part of my algorithm.
It was also fascinating to see how stories were covered differently in different outlets. The right-media framing of the formation of the new teal party, Community Strong Australia, was that it’s a muddled venture without a leader. The left framing characterised it as a “mature next step for the teal movement”, with the focus on housing, climate and social cohesion being “exactly what disaffected centrists are asking for”.
Naturally, I couldn’t resist asking my machine to analyse the federal budget coverage. I created a special overview edition for this column, which will go up on my Substack to coincide with publication. It covers 10 weeks of budget coverage, from May 1, when the pre-budget hype was already under way, to this week.
Taking into account paywalls, the overall coverage skewed left. Where zero is totally left, 100 totally right and 50 dead centre, the coverage rated a 30. Coverage in The Guardian, The Conversation and The New Daily repeatedly framed the increased tax on capital gains on assets of all kinds, together with the changes to negative gearing, as intergenerational equity. That version of the budget was given short shrift in serious economic publications. The Australian Financial Review and other fiscally conservative publications aired concerns about debt and explanations of how the taxes could negatively affect business and small investors, but these were only accessible to subscribers.
The NDIS reforms announced before the budget, on which the final figures heavily relied, were covered quite differently on each side. The left characterised them as cuts dressed up as sustainability. The right as fiscal discipline.
One section I particularly like in the analysis focuses on the stories that get a run on social media but are more or less missing from the mainstream media, and vice versa. Left-leaning TikTok read the budget’s negative gearing measures as generational payback. On Facebook, anger among older communities over the private health insurance rebate outlasted media coverage. On the flip side, the detail of a now more complex tax system passed social media by, as did defence spending. Who you are is now formed by the outlets you choose as well as the media outlets you get your news from.
I’ve found the insight into what I miss in coverage fascinating, and others have told me they’ve learnt a lot too. But there’s more to this story than intellectual curiosity.
Claude doesn’t know this, but it is a victim of the paywall skew it’s laid out for me so clearly. It’s the product of everything the internet makes free of charge. And that means, as we rely increasingly on this magnificent but brainless assistant, we are too. That might sound fine to ABC lovers. But consider the potential harm if someone you don’t like figures this out.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is an insights and advocacy strategist. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.
Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.
From our partners
Read the full article here
