Is There Such a Thing as Spin-Free News?

I just came from a briefing with Todd Herman, whose new media-technology start-up, SpinSpotter, is getting a lot of attention. In a nutshell, it's a browser-based Web application that highlights and dissects the "spin" in news stories, press releases, and even advertising and marketing copy.

I went in skeptical, partly because I didn't have a wholly accurate idea of what Herman is trying to do. The idea that you can strip away the bias, analysis and judgments from a news article, leaving only a hard core of pure objectivity, seemed to me like a fallacy. My view -- informed my Farhad Manjoo's excellent book True Enough -- is that one side's objectivity is always going to be the other side's blatant cant; consensus is impossible.

Then, too, SpinSpotter sounded like an irreducibly political undertaking. After all, when we talk about the supposed bias in the news media, we all know what kind of bias we're talking about, right? And it often seems like the people decrying spin most loudly are themselves the most fervent spinners.

To be sure, Herman, a former Microsoft manager who has also worked as a talk-radio host, is a dedicated conservative who once donated to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But he has worked hard to make his own biases irrelevant -- not least by hiring a CEO, John Atcheson, whom he describes as his political opposite. "There's not a morning that goes by that I don't walk into the office and argue politics with John for about 20 minutes," he says. "But as SpinSpotter iterates, our little conversations -- they become increasingly meaningless."

What he means by that is that SpinSpotter's judgments about what does or doesn't constitute spin are crowdsourced. Users flag the parts of stories they consider un-objective and explain their reasons for doing so; fellow users then vote on that judgment and add their own comments, with supporting documentation. In so doing, they operate within parameters set by an advisory board made up of professional journalists, who identified the "Seven Deadly Spins" (eg. leaving out important context; quoting a partisan source without disclosing his bias). There's also a class of "referees," most of whom are graduate students in journalism, who have the power to nullify judgments by users who stray from the intended framework (for instance, by making ad hominem attacks on a journalist).

On top of that, there's an artificial-intelligence component: an algorithm that watches how users behave so it can learn to automatically flag what Herman calls "high-quality spin markers" -- words or phrases frequently determined to constitute loaded language. Ultimately, it's in the intelligence that SpinSpotter gathers from its users that much of the company's value lies: Herman believes publishers and marketers will pay for access to his data. The company also plans to sell keyword advertising.

As a journalist, I told Herman, I bristled somewhat at the idea that every instance of evocative language or point-of-view in a news story constitutes "spin." Isn't there a place, I asked him, for a reporter's judgment and expertise? Isn't part of a journalist's job to weigh evidence and make conclusions about what's important and what's not, who's telling the truth and who's lying -- and thereby to spare readers from having to do that work for themselves?

Herman assured me that he's not trying to shame journalists into behaving like opinion-less androids, merely trying to give readers a way to demand, and share, more information. "We ask for one thing specifically, and we provide it, and that is transparency," he says. "We certainly want the expertise of journalists. But if you're using a shortcut, think about how it comes across to someone who doesn't have the time to go and investigate on their own."

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