Political Crunch: Evaluating Bias in the Media

Political Crunch is a politically focused social news website that allows its member community to evaluate the relative bias of news.

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What's this all about?

As the 2008 presidential election approaches, we are continually inundated with biased headlines. The left attacks the right; the right attacks the left. All of it is under the huge umbrella called 'news.' Bias isn't necessarily bad; my primary issue with it all is that there is very little transparency. It's frustrating to see major media outlets claim to be reporting objective news, when it fact most of it is obviously biased. Sorry, I'm afraid to say that it happens equally on both sides.

Political Crunch is a site that brings together the entire spectrum of political thought and ideology. It provides a platform for users to react to political punditry and identify news as leaning-left, leaning-right, and objective. Rather than simply reading the same like-minded websites/blogs everyday, it gives users the opportunity to easily explore other viewpoints. User's comments are also rated by other users as leaning-left, leaning-right, and objective and aggregated into each user's overall profile statistics.

I'm a huge fan of Digg and Reddit, however I have had the belief for quite some time that simply up-voting and down-voting does not work well with political news. In fact, users seem to only up-vote news that they agree with, and down-vote news that they disagree. With Political Crunch, the most popular content will rise to the top, but users will be able to view it in context as left-leaning, right-leaning, and objective. As one might expect, Political Crunch was heavily influenced by Digg and Reddit. Just as Kevin Rose created Digg to be an enhancement to the del.icio.us popular list, Political Crunch is an incremental innovation to better accommodate and facilitate discussion around political news.

Why was it started?

REASON 1: I have always been interested in news and politics. In fact, I have closely followed US politics for roughly 16 years (since 6th grade). I am also considered by many to be a news junkie. When any sort of major political event is live, I can be found glued to CSPAN (the stream of course). I am the type that would much rather listen to a press-conference in full, than read someone else's interpretation. Political Crunch was built to help users find interesting political news.

REASON 2: I love political debate. No, not the sorry excuse for debates that America 'performs' in presidential elections, but true debate. In fact, the more informed the opponents, the better. I love breaking issues apart to find the underlying meaning and argumentation structure. I am the type of person that finds pleasure reading material that I disagree with. It is difficult for me to take a stance on an issue until I feel like I can equally argue both sides. Political Crunch was built to give users a place to react to biased articles and offer counter arguments.

REASON 3: Building web applications is extremely addictive. Last fall, I launched SalaryScout.com with great success. It is a site that allows users to anonymously share salary information. Members can use the information found on SalaryScout in negotiations to ask for fair compensation. Building SalaryScout has been extremely fun and rewarding. As SalaryScout continues to grow, I needed to start another project to 'get my fix.' This is it. Both SalaryScout and Political Crunch have been bootstrapped from the beginning. I would much rather fail early and fail cheap, than spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars developing an application only to determine there is no demand, or the timing is off. I live by the wisdom of Guy Kawasaki, "Don't wait to develop the perfect product or service. Good enough is good enough." As with SalaryScout, everything learned from Political Crunch can be easily expressed in an equation:

Who's behind this?

I'm not by any means a political extremist, I'm just a regular guy with a lot of ideas. Ideas are the easy part, the difficulty lies in execution. Although I have many other projects brewing, Political Crunch and SalaryScout are ideas that I thought I could accomplish in a short period of time. In other words, I just went for it.

I'm left handed INTJ 27 year old from Louisville, Kentucky. That's right, middle America, home of the Kentucky Derby, KFC, the Louisville Slugger, and the University of Louisville (Go Cards!). It's a long way from Silicon Valley, but that shouldn't stop me from being creative. We now live in a connected world.

In an effort to bring life to Louisville's sleepy tech-scene, I also started Louisville Geek Dinner. If you're in da'Ville you should really attend, it's great! Other projects I've been heavily involved with are LinuxSecurity.com and EnGarde Secure Linux. I also thought I should take a minute to thank my wife Erica for her support; I couldn't have done it without her.

If you would like to contact me, the best way is through LinkedIn.