The spin we love to hate: do we really want news without a point of view?

• Author: Beato, Greg
• Position: Column

A SIDE FROM young Arab males who enjoy wearing bulky sweaters on transcontinental flights, is there any entity that attracts greater scrutiny these days than the average A.P. sentence? In this era of bitter partisanship and hypermediation, every adjective employed in the name of journalism gets a vigorous pat-down from a thousand Internet vigilantes; every expert quote is strip-searched and anally probed by Accuracy in Media and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting; every suspicious-looking statistic gets water-boarded to within an inch of its life by the ruthless inquisitors at Factcheck.org.

If you're a journalist, be grateful. Without the public's appetite for bias-induced outrage, the splatter patterns generated by plummeting circulation numbers and Nielsen ratings would be even more gruesome than they already are. The specter of spin keeps readers and viewers engaged: No blogger has ever passed up an evening of reality TV simply because he has nothing but good things to say about New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney. The desire to correct and humiliate runs deep within us all.

But do we really want to rid the world of spin?

And is it even possible to produce a news story on some controversial subject that is so devoid of bias that everyone from Noam Chomsky to Michael Savage finds it sufficiently fair and impartial? What would such a journalistic unicorn look like? Who would its audience be? According to a 2007 Pew Research Center report, 67 percent of Americans say they "prefer to get news that has no particular point of view"--a revelation that must have come as a surprise to Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore, Bill O'Reilly, Keith Olbermann, Matt Drudge, and all the other industry innovators who've enjoyed such great success delivering exactly the opposite.

Still, a growing number of Web start-ups believe that Pew statistic smells like opportunity. At the nonprofit NewsTrust.net, users collectively evaluate stories based on fairness, context, and other core journalistic principles; the highest-rated stories receive the most prominent positioning on the NewsTrust.net home page. At Skewz.com, users simply judge each story in terms of bias: Does it have a conservative slant or a liberal slant? Over time, Skewz.com uses the feedback from its users to determine a media outlet's general position on various issues. For example, according to Skewz.com users, the English version of the Al Jazeera website skews "slight right" in its 2008 election...