Mediator
Olimpia Pignatti-Morano
There is no hiding the fact that prevalent political attitudes in the media are ingrained in their reporting. It's not surprising that 72% of Americans believe "traditional major news sources report news they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading." Mediation is a sentiment of the past, and now encouraged by political battles and social rivalry we are left bewildered and enraged when we discover the outstanding estrangement (divide) in the country’s collective consciousness.
Mediator provokes interactions and reflections that critique the entrenched divisions that news outlets create through partisan, bias and subjective language. Mediator is a digital news platform that pulls the top headlines from global news and for each story sources snippets of bias language from 4 politically diverse news outlet’s coverage of the event. Mediator returns the autonomy back to the individual and provides the user with the tools to educate and investigate the broader and divergent opinions in society.
Mediator takes it a step further and encourages the user to reflect and rationalize the language they read by collecting and visually manipulating the text they found problematic or agreed with. This interactive research highlights the tensions that our diverse society struggles with in today’s media. The user is encouraged to re-evaluate, debate and mediate their ideologies with a more cohesive representation and awareness of the world today so to better co-exist. The aim is not to all agree but rather to be conscious, critical and informed about issues that we face in today’s society.