I came up with an idea several months ago and bounced it off of several people. That idea is what culminated in the @newsagg account. At the time I was writing articles about how one way to see the truth is to triangulate. This meant you needed to find as many views as you could. You needed to read mainstream media, alternative right leaning sites, alternative left leaning sites and many others. We could hopefully learn more about the actual truth by seeing where overlap occurs, where obvious misdirection occurs, and we would better acclimatize ourselves to identifying agendas of each of these sources.

The problem after I wrote that article was that there really was no place to do that. It was a painstaking process and it was easy to miss things. This is when I had the idea for @newsagg.

I thought what better place to do something like this than on the immutable steem blockchain. If myself and others could pool our knowledge about different sources we could build a routine that allowed us to build something that embodied this triangulation. For it to work it needed to be an account that eschews picking an agenda and burying others. I realize we are human and we all have our bias so I came up with a method for that account.

We would follow some simple guidelines. First we would not ALTER the original sites titles for their articles. This is something Drudge Report does and why though they are an aggregator they cannot be considered non-biased. They can skew the triangulation results.

I am an individual so I don't really consider myself right or left. I have however, certainly been more right leaning in the more than a year. So my personal bias will drift in that direction.

I actually didn't know any really good left leaning news sources when I began putting this together. This is thankfully where steemit's @preparedwombat came in early in the project with comments challenging the publication for bias due to being right leaning. I welcomed that challenge as they were correct. Yet, this was not intentional, this was due to my lack of knowledge on good potential sources that I could use on a daily basis to cover the alternative material. @preparedwombat provided me a list of them. Some of them actually worked out quite well. I realized I couldn't call them Mainstream Media though they are often closer to that narrative. It was also like fire and water if I shoved them into the Alternative News section. So I created two alternative news sections. One is clearly right leaning and I have a lot more sources to look at and growing in that area, and the other is left leaning.

This has been very informative. I will expand that section as I find more sources as well as other sources.

I do have some criteria for sites. I prefer sites that have their own information and are not simply aggregators themselves. I immediately mute tabs for sites as I am going through news so even if they are prone to blasting annoying audio and videos without solicitation I am fine with those as well. I will not go to sites that pop up malware when I try to view them, they will be immediately removed from my daily ventures. This has happened a couple of times and though the site itself seemed like a legit source they likely were partnered with someone that was feeding them malware laden ads.

I consider @newsagg to be a group account though the majority of the work there is done by me. It takes quite a bit of time though I've built templates, and will likely revise them over time. I had one reader comment that my staggered display with images and text alternating left and right is hard to read. So I will likely switch back to images on one side, and text on another similar to a Zerohedge format unless people like my current display. I will tell you that does simplify things a bit, but I need to rework the templates.

Why did I make templates? Well, they speed it up for me. They keep it consistent. They also potentially give me the tools to write tutorials so other people can back me up.

SBD Idea

One day I came up with the idea of not keeping the SBD that account earns. I had been sending that to my @dwinblood account as I do put a lot of work into those daily posts. One day I decided that though I will still send myself some of that funding I also will start sending it to people that have helped, supported, or contributed to the success of @newsagg.

So far this has been small amounts as those posts don't tend to make a lot of SBD. If they do well then the amount I send to other accounts is larger. I tend to send to @informationwar as well though I am not affiliated with them in any way. I simply believe in the purpose of that account. I also consider the triangulation approach kind of an information war tactic. Seeking the truth buried in the avalanche of propaganda.

I have decided I will continue to do this with the SBD and if the amount these posts make increase I will continue to send all of the SBD to various accounts. They will not always be to the same people though I will be sending myself some as I have though I will likely never send large amounts to myself. I will continue to send to @informationwar as long as they stay true to the mission. I will send to other people for comments, thanks for voting, tips, and other things as I can. So if in your wallet you happen to see a Thanks with a small amount from @newsagg that is what that is about. The amounts are small now, as like I said these posts do not make much.

Rules Followed There

1. Do not change the title of the articles you link to. Leave them as the author intended.
2. It is okay to skip articles on sites if you've already linked to other stories already covering pretty much the same information from the same perspective, otherwise don't skip them.
3. For the steemit section FOLLOW anyone you link to an article from #news, and up vote their posts 100% with @newsagg.
4. Do not comment with the @newsagg account in any bias for or against any topic. Use personal account if such is needed.
5. Keep posts from steemit to within the last 24 hours unless a day was missed where a headline post was not made, then the articles can extend into that missed time.

That number 3 point there is why I only post 8 articles from the Steemit #news section per day. That uses up 80% of the daily votes for @newsagg. It leaves a little breathing room for some discretionary votes here and there. If this account ever becomes sufficient in steem power to unlock the voting slider (or if we use busy.org to vote) then we may change this 100% to enable supporting more than 8 posts. Though it seems that the length of the post is pretty good, and it may not be good to add more.

As such I made each section 8 posts. I will extend the quantity of posts if a particular section has a lot of interesting articles for that day, but each section will receive a minimum of 8 posts per day.

Personal Bias

Now obviously when putting together the title for a headlines post itself there can be some personal bias. Which topics do I decide to include in the title? How do I phrase them? I know some bias can occur there, but I do try to keep an eye out for it.

The other place it can occur is in the title image. When I first started putting these together I made a collage of images from the posts I'd made. This didn't look too well.

One day I thought it might be nice to do it more like a comic section in a newspaper. I went to images.google.com and did a search on political cartoons and I sorted it to within the past 24 hours.

I pretty much would take them in the order they showed up whether I agreed with them or not. I'd build a collage from them. Some days they would be almost completely anti-Trump, and other days almost completely pro-Trump, and others they would be a mix. This was determined mostly by the sort order and how they fit on the image without becoming too small to have a point. Also many people may not know, but if you right click on an image you can view it as it's own page and those images are actually 1920x1080 in their original format but steemit shrinks them down, so if you need a closer view at the comics that is one way.

I noticed that Ben Garrison makes very high quality comics. They in my own bias were increasingly my favorites. Yet I had my rule to not be biased about choosing them until Google gave me reason. I've noticed that they tend to obviously censor or reduce access to Ben Garrison on images.google.com and often when they do appear they are in some slaughtered or edited version. They don't share from his official site ever though that is the best source.

So I got in the habit of searching "Ben Garrison" there and then "Political Cartoons" after that. This still didn't work always and showed how much they censor him. So I recently went to duckduckgo as the search engine and searched "Ben Garrison" there which lead me to his official site. I check there daily and IF he has made a new cartoon it'll likely appear in the header as they are just good, and that is my way of thumbing my nose at the censorship. So there is bias here.

That does not mean I won't still use my old method. There are not always Ben Garrison cartoons, and sometimes I can squeeze others on there with his. Some days they may not be on there at all. Yet, that header image is influenced by my bias.

Other Articles

I played with the idea of on weekends doing a non-political and non-crypto currency headlines for that week and I did post a few of those in the early days. I would like to see other non-biased type of articles posted from this account by myself or OTHERS.

I have also posted some unedited speeches with videos and transcription of the speeches. These were posted when I kept encountering false narrative, lies, and taking things way out of context. I countered this by offering up the originals in video/audio form as well as written transcripts. I did not offer any opinion on those posts, only provided the original in an unedited fashion.

These are the only types of articles I want on @newsagg. If people feel the need to inject bias they can write on their personal accounts or another account of theirs. There is plenty of bias out there. We ALL have it. I wanted a way to provide a service that might not have this problem.

That is where this project was born.

Future

I am open to having others that assist with this and providing the posting key if they have been around for awhile, have a proven knack for digging up information, and are willing to stick to the guidelines I am following. They of course would receive a larger portion of the SBD than me or others for articles they contribute. If people are interested in such then please comment on a @newsagg post and we'll see where it goes from there.

I do have people that I planned on being my backup for this project and so far that hasn't worked out. This is why there have been a few days that a headline was missed. If you'll look closely you'll notice that those were days that @dwinblood wasn't active either. In the future I'd like for this not to be the case.

If any of you have an idea for an unbiased offering you yourself would like to author on @newsagg then comment on that account.

My Opinion And What I have Noticed

I am already gaining a lot of incites by pursuing this project. This part of this post is why I placed this on my personal account rather than @newsagg as what I am going to say now is biased and my opinion.

I have noticed when a new smokescreen story comes out. It is pretty obvious. There can be something major going on like Uranium One blowing the entire "Russian Collusion" with Trump narrative out of the water, or like the Las Vegas Shootings having major information, timeline, and reality problems and the news and the left leaning alternative sites will suddenly as if running in a herd stop talking about them and instead will focus on say Trump talking to a Widow of a Vet without really bothering to look into why the widow made arrangements to have the Democratic Congresswoman present for the calls, or why after another Widow released a recording of a similar call that discredits the entire thing do they continue focusing on it. Why did they stop talking about Las Vegas? That seems a little more important than this phone call and some spoken words.
Why did they ignore and continue to ignore Uranium One? Why were they again today talking about Trump and Russian collusion when that shouldn't even be in the picture anymore with the Uranium One revelations and especially considering Robert Mueller who is leading the investigation into Trump was himself PHYSICALLY involved in the Uranium One process. Talk about conflict of interest. To me it has become a clear case of the Witches leading a Witch Hunt and of course those they accuse and burn at the stake won't actually be the witches.

I've been seeing this for awhile. It doesn't always happen, but it is common for there to be a lot of breaking stories of all different types on the Alt Right section and the Steemit section and the Left Leaning will be Trump this and Trump that focusing on very trivial and often already discredited narratives. Sometimes this bleeds over into the Mainstream Media section as well and both sections are Trump bashing while they ignore a lot of other things going on.

Now it isn't completely true that they are ignoring everything. As stated when putting these together I do so in the order and presentation of what the news outlets considered important. So I do not skip the stories they push to the front to look for the stories I want. That would be biased. So on those days they may have covered some of these other stories, but if they did they were buried under an avalanche of what I'd call the trivial.

The Mainstream Media section I generate by going to news.google.com and reading through the feed there where they aggregate. I consider google mainstream as well with their actions for some time now. So their news aggregation is a good way I've found to find the mainstream narrative. Though it has proven interesting. I will say that without a doubt the outlet that receives the most coverage is The Washington Post. That has been called a CIA front publication and if you look at it long enough it begins to seem likely.

Today was a good illustration of that. Trump announced he was going to release the remaining JFK Assassination memos that have been classified rather than continuing the classification for another 25 years. The CIA is opposed to this. This was interesting in light of the Washington Post's article in response to this being very different from most reports. It lead more support to the CIA front allegations. That article and others on the topic are in the @newsagg headline post from today.

Closing

I am not very good at keeping secrets. I'm a pretty open person. I planned to keep my involvement in @newsagg a secret, but as you can see I suck at sticking to that. I guess I'm a pretty transparent person. The truth means a lot to me, so hiding in the shadows is not something I am very good at. It bothers me.

This was my disclosure as well as a history on the who, what, and why of @newsagg. If you like the project please consider following it, voting on the daily articles you like, and consider contributing yourself.

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