Episode 173
Do Your Blindspots Steal Your Happiness? - EP. 173
In this episode of Ditch the Suits, we're back with Matt Brassard, Head of Growth at Ground News, to continue the conversation about how your media diet could be making you more confused—and more stressed—than informed. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by doomsday headlines or wondered why every story you read feels slanted, this one's for you.
We break down how Ground News works, why headlines manipulate behavior, and how algorithms are designed to keep you in a digital echo chamber. Matt pulls back the curtain on the mechanics of modern news media, revealing how the platform’s bias ratings, blind spot feed, and factuality scoring can help you ditch the drama and get back to the truth.
Highlights:
- Why most people don’t actually read news articles—and what that means for your understanding of current events
- How Ground News helps you spot bias before it hijacks your thinking
- What the blind spot feed can reveal about the stories you’re not seeing
- Why trust in traditional fact-checkers is collapsing—and what Ground News is doing differently
- How just $30 a year could restore your peace of mind and help you make better-informed life and money decisions
No fluff. No politics. Just a candid discussion about how to become a smarter news consumer in a world built on outrage. Interested in Groundnews? Visit https://ground.news/ditchthesuits to get 40% off your subscription.
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About Your Host:
Travis Maus has been in financial services for over fifteen years. He is a Senior Wealth Manager and Chief Executive Officer at S.E.E.D. Planning Group. Travis also hosts the Unleashing Leadership Podcast, where he dissects some of his favorite books on leadership and how you can apply it to your business or life.
Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker B:Welcome to Ditch the Suits podcast where we share insights nobody in the financial services industry wants you to know about.
Speaker B:We're here to help you get the most from your money in life.
Speaker B:So buckle up and welcome to Ditch the Suits.
Speaker C:All right, so we are back.
Speaker C:This is Ditch the Suits and in this episode we continue our discussion with Matt Broussard, head of growth at Ground News.
Speaker C:And as we find out more about how Ground News works, we're going to be digging into how to identify bias in the news and the importance of being aware of, I'm stealing their term blind spots.
Speaker C:We'll also discuss the importance of the factuality scoring system.
Speaker C:I think in the last episode we got into a little bit about how the on the street fact checkers were kind of slipping in their bias a little bit and we couldn't really trust that.
Speaker C:So kind of how they've evolved since then.
Speaker C:So that'll be really interesting to hear how that system works.
Speaker C:And then if you just want honest information and you're looking for a solution to like that endless doomsday scrolling that we all do on our phones where we're just like going news story to news story, episode to episode, you know, of podcasters talking about the end of the world, those types of things.
Speaker C:I think that this episode is for you.
Speaker C:We're going to try to give you some tools here that you can use.
Speaker C:As soon as this, you got to listen to the rest of the episode for sure.
Speaker C:But as soon as the episode's over, you can and listen.
Speaker C:If, if you're a listener and you're going to go out and subscribe to Ground News, we'd love to know that you heard it from us again.
Speaker C:We're not, they're not paying us for this, but I'm just interested to know how much of our listeners we're actually helping.
Speaker C:So if we've opened you up and you go out and you check out Ground News and you find them as, as a, a source that you're going to use going forward, slip it into a comment or something, let us know because that just, it feels good to help people, you know, get more out of their money in life.
Speaker C:And that's what digital suits is all about.
Speaker C:I'm Travis Moss, the CEO of Seed Planning Group.
Speaker C:Seed is a fee only wealth management firm.
Speaker C:We deal with the news all day long whether we want to or not.
Speaker C:We can't just be like, no, I'm not into politics.
Speaker C:Listen, your life, your finances are impacted by political policy and more so than policy, a lot of times is just the reactions to it.
Speaker C:That's all the market ups and downs.
Speaker C:You're seeing short term reactions to things a lot of times that don't even come to fruition.
Speaker C:So how do we dig through that?
Speaker C:So that's that the last episode set this conversation up.
Speaker C:This episode is going to bring us home on it.
Speaker B:Do you want more of Ditch the Suits?
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Speaker B:If you're wanting more announcements, notifications, even access to prior seasons, you can head to patreon.com search ditch the suits and subscribe to our channel.
Speaker B:You'll get notifications of all episodes right in your inbox.
Speaker B:So visit patreon.com search ditch the suits or head to our show Notes where we got links to our channel.
Speaker C:We're trying to share our professional knowledge and our experience of that.
Speaker C:Again, you get more out of your money in life.
Speaker C:So Matt, welcome back.
Speaker C:We got a lot to get through today.
Speaker C:It's going to be a little bit of, I think it'll be a little bit of fun.
Speaker A:Yeah, thanks.
Speaker A:Happy to still be here.
Speaker C:All right, so first off, coming off the last episode, the top thing in my head I'm thinking to me, and you said that you spent a lot of time trying to figure out how Americans are interacting with the news or consuming the news.
Speaker C:How important is the headline to American consumers?
Speaker A:Very, very, very important.
Speaker A:Just we see when posting on social media how little people click through to the headline.
Speaker A: rage, tweets can get like say: Speaker A:For us, usually around two to three people actually click through to the headline.
Speaker A:So thousands of people saw it.
Speaker A:Less than a handful click through.
Speaker C:So on click through you mean actually get into the meat of whatever the.
Speaker A:Article was, even just clicking through to our page.
Speaker A:So we can't even guarantee that they read anything, just like actually clicking on the link.
Speaker A:And that's common in the news space.
Speaker A:It's like people very seldomly actually click through, which is what causes clickbait because news sites don't make money unless you click on that link.
Speaker A:Ads, they can't sell subscriptions.
Speaker A:So just like, yeah, it's immensely important to write a good headline.
Speaker A:But the big, the big drive that creates a headline is like will a person click through to this?
Speaker A:So you have to balance proper language and proper information when making that headline.
Speaker C:I can't tell you how many times I'll read a headline and actually click through and then get disgusted because the actual article has nothing to do with the headline said like bombshell report.
Speaker C:And then you find out that it, there's like no bombshell involved.
Speaker C:It's just, you know, somebody said something and it get, you know, and it's kind of become its own news story.
Speaker C:But it, there's in no way a bombshell and then there's not even a credible source or anything to it.
Speaker C:I almost got to the point where I'll read the headline and I just go straight to the comments.
Speaker C:I'm like, I don't even want to un, I don't even want to know what somebody's bias is sometimes because, because I can tell it from the headline.
Speaker C:I going to jump straight to the comments and just see how, you know, to me that's entertaining.
Speaker C:Watching people beat the heck out of each other over stupidity.
Speaker C:You know, it's just like, everybody's just, I'm like, I just want to see if it's a fair fight.
Speaker C:Is it 10 against 1?
Speaker C:Is it 10 against 10?
Speaker C:It's almost humorous, but that headline just seems so darn.
Speaker C:Is that, is that an American problem or is that like a world problem?
Speaker A:It's pretty universal.
Speaker C:American, so at least we're not that messed up.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, it's, it's.
Speaker A:The American media sphere is bigger than any other one on Earth by like a large volume.
Speaker A:But like anywhere where there is an ad based or, or reader funded publication, that's, that's going to be an.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker C:All right, all right, so let's, let's get into ground news then a little bit more.
Speaker C:One of the things I did want to do is just set up a little bit more background who created it and who owns it today.
Speaker C:Is it still a private company and is that person still involved?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So the two founders actually are brother and sister.
Speaker C:Oh, wow.
Speaker A:Harleen Carr and Suk Seng.
Speaker A:Harleen has a background in engineering.
Speaker A:She was actually at NASA as an engineer.
Speaker A:She worked on the New Horizons mission to Pluto.
Speaker C:Wow.
Speaker A:And then she left NASA.
Speaker A:I thought that it was very bureaucratic, which there it is.
Speaker A:And then went to the private industry.
Speaker A:She worked in space startups in Europe and then was the youngest and first female VP at Rolls Royce Jet Jet Engines.
Speaker A:So she worked for a while that company and in that space.
Speaker A:Then her brother worked at Bain as a consultant.
Speaker A:And then after a few years they thought, okay, well like, you know, let's team up.
Speaker A:Helene kind of had this really cool insight that I like a lot where when working in the space industry she realized that like we have this like, God, like technology where we can.
Speaker A:We can see from space if pipes are leaking.
Speaker A:At a farm in Poland, we had that level technology that we can see this, but we can't agree on, on, like body cam footage or headlines.
Speaker A:So it's like tech can, like, solve these huge problems for us, but also the new tech that we have can create these problems, like our fractured understanding of the news.
Speaker A:So that was kind of her.
Speaker A:Her poll where it was like, you know, like, even though tech kind of put us in these chains, they can also take us out of them if done right.
Speaker A:So that was the approach that led to ground news.
Speaker A:And they're still here after eight years.
Speaker C:Shout out to them.
Speaker C:Amazing idea.
Speaker C:Okay, so ground news, the.
Speaker C:The main gist of it.
Speaker C:Tell us how it works.
Speaker A:Yeah, so kind of the.
Speaker A:The core feature of it is headline comparison.
Speaker A:So you see any story, you can compare sources from across the aisle, across the world, they're covering it.
Speaker A:So it gives you a much easier way to see kind of a fuller picture of what's happening.
Speaker A:So you just go into the app, you can swipe, you can compare, like cnn, Fox, Reuters, all across the spectrum, across the world.
Speaker A:So that's kind of the core headline comparison feature.
Speaker A:But kind of our feature that's gained a lot of popularity as of late is, is called News Blindspot.
Speaker A:So it's the idea where if you read news on a newsfeed that's curated by an algorithm like Twitter, Instagram, you probably aren't being shown stories you won't, like, won't agree with.
Speaker A:Because you follow up one person on Twitter, your first day you follow a liberal commentator, the next post that's been shown to you is going to be also by probably liberal commentator.
Speaker A:And then you, very, very quickly, to your knowledge or not, you're enveloped in this online echo chamber of your own thoughts and ideas.
Speaker A:So, and we think that this kind of way of consuming news is a core part of, like, why we feel so divided these days.
Speaker A:Because we just, you know, the billions of people on Earth now see billions of different realities whenever, daily open their phones to read the news.
Speaker A:So we attack this issue by creating what's called a blind spot feed.
Speaker A:So I use blind spot to define it.
Speaker A:It's a story that has political undertones.
Speaker A:It's only being covered by one side of the political spectrum.
Speaker A:So these news blind spots, we put them all on one feed.
Speaker A:And you can see that like, oh, like, okay, like, here's a story about.
Speaker A:Example is there's a story about the temperature of the ocean rise it's being mostly covered by folks on the left.
Speaker A:This is a blind spot for the right.
Speaker A:You can see it on the feed.
Speaker A:And then the next story was, for example, a lot of sources on the left undercovered government spending during the Biden admin.
Speaker A:So you could see stories about the Pentagon going over budget for the 10th straight year there.
Speaker A:So it's a feed of these news blind spots that aim to kind of bring everyone back on the same page because everyone on Earth sees the same stories in the blind spot feed.
Speaker A:So it's a way that we can kind of like restore this shared sense of reality that we used to have.
Speaker C: I remember in: Speaker C:They showed us the statistical analysis of how the algorithm works on a lot of social media.
Speaker C:So they would take Twitter and they showed how the algorithm feeds you more and more of whatever you click on.
Speaker C:And what it does is it removes any moderation.
Speaker C:So the algorithm on Yahoo or Apple or Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, once you start clicking on things, it's thinking, I need to.
Speaker C:There's somebody paying to have content on our platform or paying ads on our platform.
Speaker C:We need to put more stuff in front of you that you want to see so we can monetize your engagement.
Speaker C:We were.
Speaker C:It kind of like everybody's aware that they put stuff in your food to make you more addicted to sugar and stuff like that, right?
Speaker C:It's the same thing.
Speaker C:They put it the way that they program the algorithm, as if you clicked on it once, okay?
Speaker C:If you clicked on it twice, you're going to get more.
Speaker C:If you click on it a bunch of times, that's all you're going to get.
Speaker C:And it's going to pull you more and more away from seeing anything else.
Speaker C:And they actually showed the statistics on it from a political perspective, from a red and a blue.
Speaker C:And it was like there's an ocean in between.
Speaker C:The fact that if it's not extreme in either direction, you don't hear, period.
Speaker C:And you don't even hear the moderate stuff.
Speaker C:You don't even hear the stories about people getting together in a room and saying, you know what?
Speaker C:For the common good, let's get over this and let's move on.
Speaker C:You know, you'll hear the extreme about it as oh, so and so is a traitor or something like that.
Speaker C:But you don't hear about solutions that they're trying to solve.
Speaker C:So there's this like, tribalism that, that's creating.
Speaker C:But I wanted to start with what I would experience if I hit your website.
Speaker C:So I go to the website and I know you have an app and everything, but however I'm interacting, my experience when I first started was on.
Speaker C:On the website.
Speaker C:So I go to the website and I see a whole bunch of articles on all different topics.
Speaker C:And then I see red, white and blue on each article and it's showing left, right or center.
Speaker C:And the more, if I'm interpreting this correctly, the more to the left it is, the more of blue you're going to see, essentially.
Speaker C:And the more centric it is, meaning the more it's probably right down the middle you're seeing more white and then the same thing on the, on the red side of it.
Speaker C:And so can you explain just that experience?
Speaker C:I go to your web and this is the free part, right?
Speaker C:I mean, this is the.
Speaker C:I don't actually have to have a subscription.
Speaker C:I can come here and.
Speaker C:And I kind of get a.
Speaker C:So anybody who wants to check it out, you can go and you.
Speaker C:There's actually some functionality that you can see happening.
Speaker C:And what does that.
Speaker C:Left, right and center.
Speaker C:What's the rating description actually mean?
Speaker C:So if I see something and it's 33% blue, what's that mean?
Speaker A:Yeah, so the bias ratings, they're done on a source level.
Speaker A:So how it works is we have ratings from far left to far right.
Speaker A:Most of the sources you see in ground news have this rating.
Speaker A:Okay, so example is like Fox News is considered right.
Speaker A:So when you go to them, you see the red label that says right.
Speaker A:C9 is considered left.
Speaker A:This definitely isn't news to you or I or everyone, everyone here who's ever listened to them.
Speaker A:But where this comes in handy is when you come across a news source that you don't know either if it's one where it's a news source that's getting a lot of steam or it's a foreign source, or you just aren't a big news reader and you don't know the biases of sources other than like five or six big names.
Speaker A:So that's kind of the intention there, is it immediately educates you where it's like, okay, like this, this source has this bias.
Speaker A:Okay, I'll take that into consideration when I read their content.
Speaker A:And how this is done is it's not done on our end.
Speaker A:Like, we aren't, we aren't media bias analysts, but we do use ratings from a few agencies that are Very good at this.
Speaker A:At called all Sites mediavice Fact Check and Advantage, they have very detailed methodologies.
Speaker A:I won't bore your readers or your listeners with, with how it works, but the basic thing is like, okay, like if the source uses a lot of loaded words to describe certain actions, or if they just don't cover certain stories, that kind of paints.
Speaker A:Paints their bias.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:The more extreme they are in, in their dialogue that they're using towards somebody, the more that's probably going to put them into one direction or the other.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:And then they consider like hundreds of articles.
Speaker A:It's not just like off of a few, it's usually off of like a depth of the content.
Speaker C:Yep.
Speaker A:And, and then how it works is the bias bar, which we see on all stories that shows a collection of the biases of the sources that are covered in story.
Speaker A:So why that's important is it shows like, what side is covering the story more because that can often give you clues where it's like, okay, like if the story is just been covered by sources on the right, it means because the story may politically be to people who lean.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So it kind of gives you, gives you a hint where, like, what's the coverage bias of this?
Speaker A:Who's seen this and who's not seeing this?
Speaker A:So that's the, that's the intention behind the bias bar.
Speaker C:So if I wanted to, if I wanted to use that tool as something to maybe guide me in what I should be reading does something that's got more of a score in the center area, does that mean that it's more moderate and has less bias?
Speaker C:So should I be looking for articles that inherently have less bias or should I still be looking at the article?
Speaker C:So if I, let's say that I lean far to the left, should I read the far to the right article?
Speaker C:Like, is that what you mean by a blind spot?
Speaker A:Yeah, I think that bias bar, it should be instructive, but it shouldn't ever really be.
Speaker A:Like, don't read.
Speaker A:This example is like with this whole tariff thing, it's been this huge, huge story and there's been lots of facets of like, the effects of that that haven't been reported that well.
Speaker A:So one example was there was a blind spot for the left.
Speaker A:So not a lot of sources on the left covered this, but there was pretty strong private hiring data for private employers in March.
Speaker A:So despite all the chaos, hiring was still pretty strong, but that was covered just by sources on the right because it kind of made Trump's plan for Tariffs look a bit better.
Speaker A:So even though it leaned.
Speaker A:Leaned, all right, it was, it should still be important for you to read.
Speaker A:But you know, looking at the other side, there was this story that came out recently where is US consumer confidence plunged its most ever in the entire history of recording the consumer confidence.
Speaker A:And that was unreported by the right.
Speaker A:So it's like, even though the coverage of both these stories are biased and that is key to one side, both of the stories are still important to read.
Speaker A:It kind of gives you a fuller spectrum of the knock on effects of these tariffs.
Speaker A:So that's kind of how I view the instructive qualities of the bias bar.
Speaker C:So it's kind of like picking and choosing the conversations that you're having and saying, you know, that part over there is uncomfortable for me, so I don't even want to talk about it.
Speaker C:But now you don't know actually what's happening over on that side of the room.
Speaker C:And so you kind of like your glass is always half empty because you only know, you know if you're only reading.
Speaker C:And I guess that's one of the ways that you could check yourself if you're trying to figure out, you know, I'm really stressed out about everything or I have no problems at all.
Speaker C:I don't understand why everybody else is stressed out is read the other side, you know, read the things that they're talking about.
Speaker C:And it might, if anything, give you a little empathy because you may still not agree with it.
Speaker C:You might still say, well that's your problem.
Speaker C:But you still might say, but at least I understand why they're getting really worked up and really upset about this.
Speaker C:And maybe we can tone it down a little bit because at the end of the day, what happens after politics is it's all regular people getting smashed around, you know what I mean?
Speaker C:And, and, and having their lives up, you know, lives upheavaled and all that kind of stuff that's happening because other people are fighting.
Speaker C:You know, I always say politics is like smart people doing really dumb things to get attention, you know, and that's, that's.
Speaker C:If you took social media out of it, I'm not certain we'd have nearly the hyper political environment that we have.
Speaker C:It's.
Speaker C:But you can get instant gratification from being the person who does something so radical that you get a million likes.
Speaker C:In fact, you can make money off of being just a goofball.
Speaker C:And it's a really bizarre kind of world that we've ended up in.
Speaker C:So I can get that just by going to the website, which is awesome.
Speaker C:So for anybody who's thinking about what's it like, you go to that website, you're gonna get instant value, in my opinion.
Speaker C:So then there's some other features, though.
Speaker C:What's the next level up from that?
Speaker A:Yeah, so the basic, like, news comparison feature to compare headlines is free.
Speaker A:Um, but then there's other stuff that we also have on plan.
Speaker A:So there's.
Speaker A:There's a free plan and there's Pro Premium Advantage.
Speaker A:Um, I'll get into the exact details of that.
Speaker A:Like, roughly, if you subscribe to Premium, you get stuff you get more access to through the Blind spot feed.
Speaker A:On the free version, you'll only get like three or four articles, I believe, a day.
Speaker A:Um, but.
Speaker A:But for the premium version, you, you, you unlock a lot more.
Speaker C:Sorry, what's the blind spot feed?
Speaker C:Because that sounds interesting.
Speaker C:So on a regular, if you just go to the site and you kind of make a profile or everything Ground News has got, I'm going to get some kind of algorithm that's going to feed me three blind spots a day or whatever you just said.
Speaker C:But if I hit a subscription level, I can get a better understanding of the full scope of my blind spots.
Speaker A:Yeah, because on average, we find about 40 to 60 blind spots a day, and we put that on our Blind spot feed, and you can scroll through them pretty quickly, but we only show about, I think, four or five blind spots through the freezer.
Speaker A:So if you want to see more blind spots on the feed, you have to subscribe.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:So that's kind of a big deal then, is to.
Speaker C:Is to get that kind of kind of information.
Speaker C:It just seems like if you're, I think the more hypersensitive to the stuff that you are, the more that you're going to need to consume more information and understand more blind spots to kind of talk you off that ledge, to kind of calm you back down.
Speaker C:I think as extreme as everything sounds, you know, from climate change to, you know, Trump to the Democrat Party, I mean, pick your news story.
Speaker C:I think, like, there's a shred of truth in every story, but most things are much more in the middle.
Speaker C:You know, like, like when common sense actually prevails, it's like, okay, you know, we really ought to be here, but for some reason, everybody's way out to the left or way out to the right on this.
Speaker C:And the more, if you, if you were aware more of your blind spots, you'd, I think, be able to figure out, because I Think we people normally want to be agreeable.
Speaker C:I think people are.
Speaker C:You know, there's some people out there that are antagonists, but most people don't want to spend the energy fighting all the time with everybody.
Speaker C:And so it's like, how do we find that middle ground?
Speaker C:Well, you have to understand what you don't know.
Speaker C:So, okay, so I subscribed.
Speaker C:Is the Blind Spot feed.
Speaker C:Is that the first level subscription?
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:So if you, if you subscribe to the, the premium you get, you get, you, you get more access through the Blind Spot feed.
Speaker A:But you also, you also, but you also unlock, unlock our factuality ratings which show you the factuality of every news source, which for us is a strange feature because like we, again, like, we're, we're not fact checkers.
Speaker A:We don't want to be seen as a fact checker.
Speaker A:I think again, fact checking is really cool in theory, but just with the way that trust has now, I don't think a trusted fact checker will ever happen unless the way that we engage with stuff online changes drastically.
Speaker A:But I'm not, I'm usually more.
Speaker C:You'd have to regulate the fact checkers.
Speaker C:So you can't.
Speaker C:We're at the.
Speaker C:And you brought it up great.
Speaker C:In the last episode, you talked about how you originally wanted people on the ground to just tell us what's happening.
Speaker C:And then it starts to slant towards what the story they want to tell more so than anything.
Speaker C:And in order to have fact checkers be what people think fact checkers are, they'd have to actually be extremely regulated.
Speaker C:And there's no regulatory body for that.
Speaker C:And frankly, the idea of fact is very difficult because 99% of things, you know, the what's floating around out there is all opinion.
Speaker C:And so, you know, you can, you can take our conversation and you could, you know, probably a hundred times just in this episode, say false, false, false, false, false.
Speaker C:But it depends on what nuance of false.
Speaker C:Like if I say all people that's false.
Speaker C:It's never all people.
Speaker C:There's some amount of people, right?
Speaker C:I mean, there's just on the nuance of how fact finding works.
Speaker C:So we want to be very careful because there are people out there that will let their bias drive their fact findings.
Speaker C:So you have a factuality score that's kind of got a lineage to this other problem and trying to solve this other problem.
Speaker C:How does it try to solve that problem?
Speaker A:Yeah, so we, what we do is we rate factuality on more level of the, of the publisher instead of.
Speaker A:Okay, so, so the idea is because again, it's like it'd be nearly possible to fact check every article and even the methodology of doing that would be gray and very, very pretty much, we think, like impossible to pull off at scale, that is if it's trusted.
Speaker A:But what we thought was our solution was more so to be, okay, like, let's look at this new source.
Speaker A:And again, like, we use third parties for this that do this as their main business, but the methodology is strong.
Speaker A:Where it's, they'll look at the history of a publication and they'll, it's like, okay, you know, in the past they've done actions that have harmed their credibility as a news source.
Speaker A:So a common one is like, when they get a story wrong, a good news source should publish a correction and notice where it's like, hey, we got a story because of X, Y and Z.
Speaker A:Here's this correction at this time.
Speaker A:So that's like basic principles of good journalism.
Speaker A:Some sources don't do that, or they do, they kind of hide at the bottom where it's like, hey, we got this wrong.
Speaker A:So that infraction kind of dings the credibility of that source.
Speaker A:And over time, the worse that publication is in terms of their factuality.
Speaker A:So what we do is we take ratings from these sources that evaluate these alerts on their factuality and we'll rate it from a very low to very high.
Speaker A:So we'll show you, like, okay, like they are, you know, a very low level of trustworthy.
Speaker A:They're mixed or, you know, in between.
Speaker A:So the idea is that again, as a news consumer, we don't want to tell you to like, hey, don't read this because you know, our readers are adults, they have critical thinking skills.
Speaker A:Right, but we do want to.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker A:We do want to, yeah.
Speaker A:But we do want to give context because also it's like we don't expect readers and users shouldn't know the in depth reporting history of every article on earth.
Speaker A:So by this label, it makes that choice a lot easier where it's okay, I should pause when reading this article and consider their history of actuality when I process what happened.
Speaker C:And does that help with the problem of unnamed sources?
Speaker C:Because I know that this is a big trend and this is a big push with the media that I watch.
Speaker C:And again, I'm a broad consumer because frankly, I get tired of one side or the other always just trying to make the other side look bad.
Speaker C:So I kind of flip flop and listen to both sides quite often.
Speaker C:But there's this whole issue with Unnamed sources.
Speaker C:So, and so who, we don't have to tell you from such and such place, who has credentials we don't have to tell you about said this and therefore it's a fact.
Speaker C:And they actually use that to launch other news stories and other investigations.
Speaker C:I did this thing one time.
Speaker C:I, I had a dog that had cancer and they recommended that we do chemotherapy for the dog.
Speaker C:And the dog was like a 13 year old dog.
Speaker C:And so I researched, maybe it was 11 year old dog, I can't remember how old.
Speaker C:I researched chemotherapy in dogs.
Speaker C:And the best I could do is I could find two sources for all of the research, one of which was done by Pfizer, who by the way made the chemo or the radiation drug.
Speaker C:And they had done a study, a very small study of about 80 dogs.
Speaker C:And the conclusion is that they extended the life of the dog literally by a couple of months.
Speaker C:So you're talking about torturing a dog for months to add one or two months to the end of their lives on average.
Speaker C:That's an asinine idea.
Speaker C:But then all the other research that you found online referenced that paper as if it was end of story and a conclusive study.
Speaker C:And there was one other study where they tracked 12 dogs through clinical treatments of different breeds and different ages and made another conclusion on whether.
Speaker C:So it was like when you actually check the sources, it's like those are not real credible sources.
Speaker C:And it even gets worse when you have in today's news, you know, I have a source that told me this and you say, well, who's the source?
Speaker C:I can't tell you.
Speaker C:It's somebody important though.
Speaker C:And it's like you could just make that up.
Speaker C:Nobody would know.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:And that that has happened a lot in media.
Speaker A:Like example was during COVID if you remember that whole like hydrogen cloxy chlorine thing.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, that thing.
Speaker A:There's a story that, I believe it was a, an Elliot broke, where like there was so much people who were in this local hospital because of like hydrocloxic chlorine poisoning that they couldn't treat gunshot victims.
Speaker A:So that was a huge saying.
Speaker A:Media on left was like, oh, like, you know, this is what Trump's doing, making all these people drink this, this, this horse paste or.
Speaker C:Right.
Speaker A:So it turned out that the source was completely fake.
Speaker A:Someone actually went to the channel and was like, hey, is it happening?
Speaker A:And they're like, no, not at all.
Speaker A:But because the one source covered it without checking the sources, other news outlets also cover that story based off their reporting.
Speaker A:So it's like there's this mini like scandal based off a made up, a made up crisis.
Speaker A:So like in that case, that was a pretty bad miss for that paper.
Speaker A:So they got their credibility dinged.
Speaker A:Now they're like a lower factuality on ground news.
Speaker A:So it's like, okay, when the UNAM sources is like, it's hard because occasionally those are fine.
Speaker A:And that is how you treat sources who are like very, very vulnerable.
Speaker A:But when it's busted, that like that source was bunk.
Speaker A:That is considered in our ratings by sources that evaluate factuality.
Speaker C:So, so one of the things I found really interesting is because we talked about the how people when, like, if you're Republican and Republic, you know, Trump's, Trump and the Republican Party have all, all of Congress in the White House, you tend to stop tuning in as much.
Speaker C:You know, like, you're like, okay, I like where things are going.
Speaker C:So I'm not going to check every day to see if destruction is here versus on the left.
Speaker C:You're going to Trump's here, the Republicans are here, destruction's imminent.
Speaker C:I gotta check on this every day.
Speaker C:And then when it flips the other way, it does, you know, you do exactly the same thing, go, you know what, Biden's fine, I'm gonna let him drive.
Speaker C:I'm not gonna pay as much attention, you know, and the other side's, you know, I gotta check in every day because they're ruining this, that and the other thing.
Speaker C:So you kind of get the same thing with the factuality score from a standpoint of if you are not paying attention.
Speaker C:So if you just read one article and say, okay, that's enough, I'm gonna check in next month.
Speaker C:You miss the retraction, you miss it when they come back and they say, yeah, we got in trouble because we said some stuff that wasn't true.
Speaker C:And we're gonna, we're gonna correct that now.
Speaker C:And that's why, that's why defamation is, is, is such a, an issue because once you cause that reputational damage, it gets in somebody's head.
Speaker C:And how often are you in a habit of watching the news enough so that you can actually catch, we said this thing and it wasn't true and we're not supposed to say that.
Speaker C:So we're gonna offer an apology now and we're gonna retract the story.
Speaker C:Story.
Speaker C:You almost never see that.
Speaker C:And I think it happens quite often actually, because you're just moving on to the next story.
Speaker C:I already read that story.
Speaker C:I'm not Going to read it again, you know, and.
Speaker C:And so it's one of those things where I think you.
Speaker C:If you're gonna dabble in the news, it's really hard if you don't actually have a source that's helping you understand what you're missing and, and what's already being proven to, you know, publish stories that, you know are low in that factuality score.
Speaker C:Because otherwise you don't have enough context, you don't have enough body of knowledge of the material that's out there to understand.
Speaker C:These guys get it wrong all the time.
Speaker C:I just don't normally see their articles, you know.
Speaker A:Exactly.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's.
Speaker A:It's a good way to see if any of source is trustworthy.
Speaker A:Is trustworthy, aside from ground news, is if you go on the website and if you could define their attraction page and it's very easy, visible, great.
Speaker A:Oh, if they don't have one run.
Speaker A:Because every good news source should have.
Speaker A:Should, should have that.
Speaker A:And so it's kind of like a quick way to look at when you're looking at a new source.
Speaker C:I wish they had a conflict of interest page.
Speaker C:I wish you could actually go and see how many people have actually made money in government for a political party that are now at that news station.
Speaker C:Like, that would be pretty telling.
Speaker C:You'd be able to go there and you don't even need them to say anything else.
Speaker C:You'd be like, okay, I understand exactly what's going on here.
Speaker C:Okay, so we've got factuality score.
Speaker C:We've got blind spots.
Speaker C:That is that part of the premium package.
Speaker C:You get all of that?
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:So you get all that.
Speaker A:You get more customer, you get more customization with your newsfeed.
Speaker A:You can like filter out more sources and have more control.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker A:But the two main sources for that are more access to blind spots and actually rings.
Speaker C:Okay, so like I'm a.
Speaker C:I'm a.
Speaker C:You know, I feel like I'm trying to sell this a little bit, but the point that I think I have, for anybody listening this, I don't want to insult you at all, but ground news is extremely inexpensive.
Speaker C:Like I got on there and it was.
Speaker C:I think it's a hundred dollars a year for the premium.
Speaker A:That's for actually the Vantage plan.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker C:The Vantage plan.
Speaker C:So there's.
Speaker C:That's above premium.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker C:Okay, so what's the premium plan cost then?
Speaker C:Because I just skipped that.
Speaker C:I saw a hundred dollars a month and I'm.
Speaker C:Or $100 a year.
Speaker C:It's a year, right?
Speaker C:Not a month, it's a year.
Speaker C:Yeah, So I saw $100 a year and I'm like, okay, that's a deal, because I don't have to go and try to figure all this stuff out myself now.
Speaker C:But you have a premium plan.
Speaker C:That's the one we've been talking about.
Speaker C:And what's that premium plan cost?
Speaker A:It is 30 a year.
Speaker C:30?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:3 0.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:30 a year.
Speaker C:Yeah, I thought I misheard.
Speaker C:It's 30.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker C:So for less than three, what's that come out to?
Speaker C:Two and a half dollars a month?
Speaker A:Two hundred and thirty three a month.
Speaker A:So pretty, pretty affordable if you care about the news a lot.
Speaker C:Okay, so I mean that, listen, if, if for our listeners, if you're stressed out about the news and you're stressed about the politics and your family's fighting all the time and your neighbors are fighting and you go to work and people are ticked off at each other and you're trying to figure out all the different things that are going on and if tariffs are going to cause you to not be able to retire and all that kind of stuff, I think you can get a pretty good peace of mind for $30 a year.
Speaker C:I mean, I, I'm, I, listen, don't go and up the price after our episode because I think that that's, I, I just, I'm a huge advocate for anytime you can get information and somebody is helping kind of aggregate it for you so you don't have to have 15 different public subscriptions with other news sources.
Speaker C:You can get it there and you get the blind spot tool, which tells you, you know what you're missing.
Speaker C:You get the left, right, center.
Speaker C:That's why I call it the left, right, center thing.
Speaker C:You know, you get to understand what the angle is and then you get the, with the factuality scoring, you can tell if it's a credible news source.
Speaker C:I mean, it just, I don't know.
Speaker C:I, I'm, I'm so excited that we ran across this and, and if we have, you know, one person that signs up and they get help for kind of dealing with this kind of super hyper political media that's freaking everybody out about, you know, the end of financial time, the Great Depression that's coming, or something like that.
Speaker C:I hope that this helps because I think that, you know, the first thing that you get when you read it is you go, okay, all right, that's a little bit extreme.
Speaker C:Look, it's all blue or it's all red.
Speaker C:That's a little extreme.
Speaker C:You know, what I mean, like, let's see what the counter argument is.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's a very cheap price to pay for peace of mind, for sure.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:Well, thank you for everything that you do.
Speaker C:Is there anything else that you want to throw out there or are we good to go on this?
Speaker A:Yeah, nothing extra, I guess.
Speaker A:Just like.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:If you like what you've heard and you want to check our news, we have an app, the App Store, Just Ground News.
Speaker A:Our website is Ground news dot com.
Speaker A:If you're more of a person who prefers to engage with news through newsletters, we also have newsletters as well.
Speaker A:So just look up Ground News newsletters and then you can subscribe to them there as well.
Speaker C:And certainly they can follow you on social media, too.
Speaker C:It's a great way to kind of get a taste of the overall program.
Speaker C:So thank you very much, Matt.
Speaker C:It was great to talk to you today.
Speaker A:Thanks a lot.
Speaker B:Thanks for checking out Ditch the Suits.
Speaker B:Be sure to write a review or drop a comment about this episode.
Speaker B:And if you want more like this, head over to ditchthesuits.com you can send us a message and get in touch.
Speaker B:Let us know how we can help and be sure to share any topics you'd be interested in having us cover on the show.
Speaker B:We're here to help you get the most from your money in life.
Speaker B:Thanks for being our guest and checking out Ditch the Soup.
