Culture: News: Perspective
Percent Representative   (+1)  [vote for, against]
Cameras naturally focus on extremes, but how representative is this?

When a city has 99% normal, nice, peaceful people, and 1% decide to behave irrationally & violently, which people will show up on TV?

We can't change the incentives in TV. Media will always find more traffic, & thus more ad revenue, when they focus the camera on the crazy few.

Yet, TV loves to have "social engagement" in the ticker at the bottom, showing how people "react" to the news, & thus, by being on the TV, create the news in a mobius strip paradox.

So, the idea here, is that on all broadcasts, they have a tiny portion on the left/bottom side, where our service (Representative Checker, Inc) provides data as to how representative the demonstrated POV is in fact.

Ex: When they are showing Westboro Baptist Church members protesting at Robin Williams funeral saying he'll go to hell, the TV stations send an API with that data to our servers, and we return, "only <1% of Christians believe Robin Williams will go to hell, and 80% believe WBC will go to hell".

Ex #2: When they are showing looters in Furgeson, the API call will remind them that, "95% of Furgeson residents who protest, do so peacefully without looting."

Ex #3: When they show that a young man was killed by police, the API will return, "95% of police never killed anyone"

Ex #4: When Israeli's send seve........ <!-- end of transmission --/>
-- sophocles, Aug 18 2014

If it were just a camera that tallied the headcount in a shot and translated it into a percentage of some overall population, virtually every gathering would seem irrelevant.
-- 4and20, Aug 19 2014


To clarify, the idea is an API service for media to check how representative a pic is to the real population.
-- sophocles, Aug 19 2014



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