It's obvious that there's a huge problem at the moment, particularly in America, in that people of different views are polarised and ghettoised into their own communities and news-sources. The right-wing, in particular, seem keen on rejecting reality and alternative ideas for their own ever-more extreme viewpoints. The charge is always that you can't trust [whatever] because of its [liberal/right-wing] bias.
People aren't communicating with the other side, but when they do it's confrontational and just serves to exacerbate things.
So here's an idea for a news/commentary site that can be trusted and read by people of all stripes, hopefully bringing them together to talk.
First off, try for initial stories to be as unbiased and objective as possible (e.g., BBC or Wikipedia), but for bias/legitimacy scores to be allocated via community moderation.
Commentaries and notes can also be tagged as such, and the highest scoring responses are all viewed along with the article along with their own slant. Fact-checking should be considered highly important, as should gentlemanly discourse.
Of course, we need to find a way to stop the moderation being abused by trolls and agenda-groups, and everything should be made as transparent as possible. Could reddit and slashdot's karma models be used as a basis? How could we take partisanship into account?
Any thought?
