While the news is constantly talking about artificial intelligence, a reverse trend is growing too: artificial intelligence talking about the news.
In the weeks since 7 October 2023, one 26-year-old data scientist, Nima Akram, pushed that trend further.
Shocked by the coverage of Gaza in the mainstream Western media, Nima set aside time from his full-time corporate job to create NewsCord, a generative AI platform that compares and contrasts said coverage.
Fast forward 13 months, NewsCord is a savvy website and flourishing Instagram page, 30,000+ followers strong, with a dedicated app on its way too.
“We all saw the way the Western media was justifying and manufacturing consent for Israel’s war, subduing the public into just accepting what it was doing with complete impunity,” Nima tells The New Arab.
“I felt helpless, but compelled to do something to dispel false narratives. And so, using AI and large language models (LLM), I created NewsCord to compare the coverage of specific news developments on a massive scale – and without any favour to any publication, as we apply the same analysis to Al Jazeera as we do for the Telegraph.”
Every day NewsCord provides a side-by-side comparison of news articles around the main stories relating to Palestine and Lebanon, such as the news around the torture of Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, a prominent Gazan surgeon who was killed in an Israeli prison in May.
“NewCord summarises the differences in narrative and tone of a voice, such as the active vs passive vs sensationalist vs objective voice," Nima explains.
"It also points out contradictions and whether a story has any missing information or context. Doing this comparison is powerful because I think a lot of people won't realise just how one-sided an outlet’s narrative is on a particular subject until they see a side-by-side comparison."
Making the model reliable
As with any automated machine-learning-based technology, such as ChatGPT, inaccuracies are possible and fully disclaimed on NewsCord’s website. It is well known that the likes of OpenAI and Google Gemini have preconceptions and biases wired into their data and LLMs.
“We try to limit these errors by fine-tuning our LLM prompts on our ever-growing dataset. To use industry-speak, we have something called a ‘retrieval augmented generation chain’, where we essentially give our LLM all the articles and store them as documents in our vector database," Nima continues.
"We then ask it a series of questions that are objective and simple, namely: what are the differences between this specific selection of articles?” he explains.
To make NewsCord even more reliable and state-of-the-art, the platform also processes and encourages mass user feedback.
“We're making it crowd-run so that people can go on the website and thumbs up or thumbs down our entries. Over time, this improves the LLM’s power to compare and summarise the media landscape.”
Holding publications to account
In recent months, NewsCord’s Instagram has been partnering with Accountable Media and Unmute Humanity (two platforms that are also tackling media bias) to highlight some of the most egregious instances of Western coverage.
“For example, in early June, when the Israeli army rescued four hostages in Gaza, the majority of Western media headlines omitted the fact that the operation killed some 210 Palestinians,” says Nima.
To push back against these moments of journalistic incompetence, NewsCord has teamed with Accountable Media’s AI-generated complaint template to help people send official complaints to mainstream media outlets.
“NewsCord identifies a false narrative from, for example, the BBC. We then create an Instagram post about it and then run a complaint campaign with Accountable Media.”
As a result, NewsCord has facilitated over 20,000 formal complaints to the BBC, CNN, Sky News and many others.
Four ways of manufacturing consent
Over the last 13 months of running NewsCord, Nima has seen and quantified “countless cases of the media being absolutely complicit in Israel’s war crimes”. He categorises this phenomenon into four themes.
The first is an obfuscation of the perpetrator and, more specifically, the cause of Palestinian deaths.
“Massacre after massacre, mainstream publications have tended to omit Israel as the clear attacker in the headline. Palestinians are killed in a vacuum,” he says.
The next theme is dehumanisation. “Remember when I was talking about the 210 Palestinians who were left out of headlines after Israel’s rescue operation? This is a classic example of Western media assigning less value to Palestinian lives than Israeli lives,” Nima adds.
The third theme is delegitimisation. One of the main manifestations of this theme is the tendency of many mainstream publications to caveat Palestinian fatalities with the rejoinder: “According to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health.”
German media, such as Deutsche Welle, are particularly consistent in this, as is the BBC. “By linking these statistics to, what the West proscribes as, a terrorist organisation, Western media undermines and downplays the believability of mass civilian casualties in Palestine at the hands of Israel,” Nima explains.
The fourth theme is vilification, which has been particularly evident in how the media has portrayed the West’s unprecedented pro-Palestine protest movement over the last 14 months.
“The Western media has played a critical role in vilifying those that have protested, calling them ‘riots’ and ‘anti-Semitic’, for example, and consistently downplaying the numbers involved. You will see a BBC headline describing a 300,000-person protest in London as ‘thousands gather’.”
The New Arab also reported on this trend last month after analysing hundreds of headlines from The Sun, the Daily Mail, and The Telegraph on the pro-Palestine protests. Not a single one was positive.
NewsCord is entirely self-funded by Nima Akram. It can be found on Instagram here
Sebastian Shehadi is a freelance journalist and a contributing writer at the New Statesman
Follow him on X: @seblebanon