Relatively comparable blogs with right-wing or left-wing comments?
May 7, 2016 1:09 AM Subscribe
For a linguistic/discourse/stylistics project, I would like to collect a large corpus of comments to blogs or online news that can be easily classified as left wing or right wing. I'm a bit overwhelmed by all the possibilities, so can anyone who has been following American political sites more than I have suggest pairs of right-wing-ish / left-wing-ish sites I might want to look at?
I'm happy to do the right-wing/left-wing classification manually by looking for comments that unambiguously put forward a viewpoint that agrees with that of a republican or democratic candidate. But it would speed things up, I think, if I can start by scraping the comments from a site that is known to skew strongly either left or right, and then just read the comments to weed out opposing views. If I do it this way, I would need to use at least one left wing and one right wing site, and they need to be relatively similar in terms of type of site (news, opinion, single vs multiple author etc), number of commentators, moderation policies, etc.
I'm happy to do the right-wing/left-wing classification manually by looking for comments that unambiguously put forward a viewpoint that agrees with that of a republican or democratic candidate. But it would speed things up, I think, if I can start by scraping the comments from a site that is known to skew strongly either left or right, and then just read the comments to weed out opposing views. If I do it this way, I would need to use at least one left wing and one right wing site, and they need to be relatively similar in terms of type of site (news, opinion, single vs multiple author etc), number of commentators, moderation policies, etc.
Ask Metafilter recently helped me find a long list of polite and thoughtful right wing blogs. So there is half your initial work done for you.
posted by seasparrow at 6:24 AM on May 7, 2016
posted by seasparrow at 6:24 AM on May 7, 2016
The Volokh Conspiracy is housed by the Washington Post and written by a group of mostly libertarian-leaning lawyers. The blog content is of an exceptionally high level, and draws good comments from both sides. You have to register, but not pay, to comment yourself.
posted by SemiSalt at 8:02 AM on May 7, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by SemiSalt at 8:02 AM on May 7, 2016 [1 favorite]
Best answer: I like the site All Sides for this kind of thing. They have a listing here of how many news sites lean.
posted by jabes at 8:25 AM on May 7, 2016
posted by jabes at 8:25 AM on May 7, 2016
TPM (liberal) and The Corner on National Review (conservative)
posted by John Cohen at 2:50 PM on May 7, 2016
posted by John Cohen at 2:50 PM on May 7, 2016
Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I'll have a go with all of those suggestions. Marking jabes comment as best answer just because it's the most comprehensive and a resource I didn't know about and johngorens too because it got a fair few favourites which I take to mean people agree with him.
posted by lollusc at 7:21 PM on May 7, 2016
posted by lollusc at 7:21 PM on May 7, 2016
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posted by johngoren at 3:45 AM on May 7, 2016 [5 favorites]