DIANES: A DEI Audit Toolkit for News Sources
Subramaniam Vincent, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics
Yi Fang, Computer Science and Engineering
Professional news media organizations have always touted the importance that they give to multiple perspectives. However, in practice, the traditional approach to all-sides has favored people in the dominant culture. Hence it has come under ethical critique under the new norms of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). When DEI is applied to journalism, it goes beyond conventional notions of impartiality and bias and instead democratizes the journalistic practice of sourcing – who is quoted or interviewed, who is not, how often, from which demographic group, gender, and so forth.
The Markkula Center's Journalism and Media Ethics program in collaboration with the School of Engineering have built a series of back-end and front-end projects that allows the understanding of how different types of news sites show up on source diversity metrics. We have successfully re-purpose our extraction, parsing, pre-processing, and analysis pipelines on WAVE into the back-end of our DEI Audit prototype and toolkit project. This has created an opportunity for real-world American local newsrooms to examine and improve their everyday source diversity at very low or zero prototype costs.
A research paper describing the DAINES system has been accepted for publication at ACM SIGIR 2022.