Over the past months, while exploring my project, I’ve spoken with people who approach news in very different ways.
Some happily pay for one or multiple outlets. Others, perhaps most, rely on whatever surfaces through social feeds or group chats. And if you strip away the minor variations, one simple, honest question shows up again and again among those who are weary of the daily feed:
“The news is biased. I just want something neutral. Why is that so hard?”
It sounds like a simple ask, a basic demand for dignity.
But the truth is this: there is no such thing as unbiased news. Neutrality isn’t something the system can produce, even when everyone involved is trying their best.
Let me share why this realization isn’t a failure of journalism, but the key to smarter reading.
The First Bias: Selection of Facts (Gatekeeping)
Most readers imagine an article as a snapshot of reality. In truth, it’s a slice. A decision about where to point the camera and what to leave outside the frame.
A newsroom chooses what counts as an event, what deserves attention, what can be ignored for now, what should be foregrounded, and how the rest should recede. This concept, often studied formally as Agenda-Setting Theory or Gatekeeping, proves that the selection of which facts and events are deemed newsworthy is the first layer of interpretation. If you change any of those choices, the story shifts immediately.
This is unavoidable. The world is too dense and too chaotic to present without some kind of selection. Journalists must operate under deadlines and limited resources, which necessitates that they choose, structure, and simplify, leading to inherent bias derived from professional norms.
The Second Bias: Choice of Words (Framing)
Even once the facts are chosen, the way they’re written changes their weight. Small linguistic decisions—headline verbs, implied causality, which detail comes first—all influence how a reader interprets the situation. This process is known as Framing.
The choice of a single word can drastically alter the perceived reality of an event. For example, the neutral reality of a “Military action” can be reframed as an “Invasion” to evoke hostility. Similarly, people exercising their right to assemble, known neutrally as “Protesters,” are dismissed as “Rioters” to delegitimize their cause. Furthermore, essential “Social programs” can be insultingly reduced to mere “Handouts,” implying waste and dependency. The use of these loaded terms generates vastly different reader interpretations despite referencing the same underlying action or policy.
None of this is a plot. It’s simply what happens when human beings try to put the world into sentences. Hundreds of micro-decisions accumulate, and the final piece carries the fingerprints of those choices.
Inside the Newsroom: Institutional Bias
Readers often picture journalism as a linear act. The real process is layered and textured: A reporter collects information. An editor looks for a line of coherence. Someone else checks for clarity. Another person adjusts the structure. All along the way, people lean on their experience, instincts, and institutional constraints.
The end result feels natural because the craft is invisible, but the workflow, resource allocation, and even the publication’s legal or historical alignment all shape the final meaning. This is why bias is systemic, often stemming from organizational practices.
Framing is Meaning Making
If you strip away all of that structure, you don’t get “pure facts.” You get noise. A pile of observations without context or direction.
Most people don’t have the time or the cognitive space to convert raw events into understanding every single day. Journalism steps in to do that interpretive work. It sorts, arranges, highlights, and explains so the information becomes usable. It provides a causal narrative connecting disparate events.
Meaning doesn’t exist without framing. You need one for the other. Without the journalist’s interpretive work, the cognitive burden on the reader would lead to immediate information overload
What Should We Seek Instead of Objectivity?
Since neutrality is an impossible ideal, the serious reader must shift their goal. We shouldn’t be seeking a perfect single source; we should be seeking a range of high-quality perspectives.
Quality is the priority.
One good analysis can help you deeply understand, giving you verified data, context, and sophisticated reasoning. That depth is what makes it valuable.
While there is so much superficial noise out there, even reading hundreds of low-quality pieces won’t touch the essential truth. It’s a real challenge to find good content, especially as AI generates generic stuff at scale.
Clarity is achieved by widening the lens.
When you read multiple high-quality pieces on the same topic—each from a different institutional background and carrying its own assumptions—the shape underneath starts to appear.
One article gives you an angle.
A handful gives you a map.
The contrast between them gives you insight.
The contrast is key because it reveals the underlying assumptions of each source. One source might frame a political issue as a moral failing, while another frames the same facts as an economic reality. Seeing these competing frames allows you to deconstruct how each outlet is constructing meaning, moving you closer to a grounded understanding.
The Real Problem: Access to Range is Broken
Even people who want this kind of range struggle to achieve it.
The pieces that actually explain the world in depth usually sit behind paywalls. Search engines often bury them under lighter, higher-traffic content. Research on information consumption confirms that many users are caught in “filter bubbles” or “echo chambers,” limiting their exposure to opposing high-quality views.
We want to know new trends and patterns on the subjects we care about. Instead, we get a scatter of articles we never asked for. We’re frustrated by the mismatch between our need for meaning and the broken information environment.
A More Realistic Approach: Taking Control
If neutrality is impossible and range is essential, the system needs to work differently. And that’s what Averris is trying to bring to you.
- Start from a question. You decide what you want to know.
- Averris presents the factual context and surfaces the essential angles to answer your question.
- You choose a relevant angle.
- Averris shows you 3 full articles with different perspectives from this angle and shows you how they differ. Crucially, we show you the frame: where the source is positioned, and whether it uses loaded language.
- And if you want to follow the topic as it evolves, Averris will do that for you, filtering the noise to bring you only the critical updates, always accompanied by a diversity of perspectives. Your understanding deepens over time.
That’s how you can control your attention. You decide the agenda, instead of media constraints or algorithmic confirmation loops. That’s how you can form a balanced view—by seeing an event from multiple angles and perspectives, getting the full picture instead of being guided by a single narrative.
Beneath all the complaints about bias and the exhaustion with noise, there’s a basic desire that we share: to understand the world well enough to make grounded decisions for our futures.
We don’t need more news. We need a way to see the structure behind it. That’s the direction this project is taking. It’s not another feed to overwhelm you. It’s a way for us, serious readers and thinkers, to understand the world with a clearer mind.