When seeing this listed as a problem here on IdeaConnection today the solution seemed rather readily apparent though I do not, myself, have the money to pursue it. This is what I propose:

*A community website dedicated to being "watch-dog" over all News Agencies, national and international.

*Said website will have no direct affiliation with any one news agency and will not receive direct monetary compensation from any news agency for any reason.**

*This website will have a member base of presumably news-oriented individuals. Individuals who watch the news every day or nearly every day. This is a great many people.

*Only members of this site (free to join but requires name and valid email) may participate in the site in any way. No 'anonymous' posters.

*The site will employ what I call a "polling and counter rating system". Each day at the same time polls will open that will poll participating members on whether they thought that the news agencies that they watched that day were guilty of bias. All poll participants will be required to end their submission with a written description of the bias that they claim to have witnessed, if any. If the member is reporting that there was no bias they will be required to write a 100 character minimum recap of the main stories that they watched. The purpose of this is to weed out those individuals who are attempting to report "non biased" in support of their favorite agency who are not willing to put in the required effort and to attract and maintain a user base who is passionate about the subject at hand to put in the extra effort. An algorithm will be put in place that is capable of scanning the written text and detecting "mumbo jumbo", ie, words that seem to make no sense. An example would be:

"dferffrd dedrf edefrfr hthth dfeded..."

These submissions will be automatically deleted and the submitting user flagged.

These polls can occur on the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly levels. The site's "counter rating" system consists of a system whereby interested users can view the individual poll results and rate them from 1 to 5. This member will also be required to give a written summary of their reasoning. An example of why this is useful: Imagine that you, as a member, frequently see a particular member giving positive feedback to a site day after day whilst giving generic reasons why. If you happen to watch the same news cast that morning and you disagree you can then site this and shed light on the users behavior.

If enough members "flag" a given member then the issue will be brought to the attention of site staff. No type of disciplinary action would be taken on the 'offender' however. The purpose is not to block their right to free speech, it is another way to find instances of New Agencies' unethical behavior. Given that a large amount of people disagreed with a sub set of members that a news agency was unbiased that day, it bears looking into.

My proposed counter rating system is admittedly not perfect. It could result in a fair amount of "mud slinging" and hidden agendas. However, I submit that it is much better than none at all.

*The site will feature a point system. This point system is for members who have caught news agencies being biased red handed. If a member happens to record a news cast and catches biased reporting red handed they can upload the video to the site where it will be voted on by the community. If the consensus is that the material is, indeed, biased the member will gain points. Eventually such members can become "Whistle Blowers" and gain access to special privileges. The purpose of this is two fold: To encourage such reporting and to cultivate a competitive edge into the site and to put constant pressure on the news agencies. Let this be the motto: "The watchers are being watched". The ranking system for these users can be thus: "Gum Shoe", "Quality Reporter", and "Whistle Blower" and will be determined by amount of points accumulated.

*Once all of the data is collected for the target time frame the polls and counter ratings are taken into account via an internal (and no doubt complex) algorithm and the results are made public.

If this were to become an established website in the US alone the pressure on the news agencies would be enormous.

**The site could easily monetize via Google Adsense. The contextualized ads would likely bring in many clicks as users are already primed to click on news related links. However, this means necessarily that there would be ads for particular news agencies on the site. I suggest therefor, that these ads be allowed as long as each news agency has equal opportunity to post such ads and this not be considered a case of the site taking money from any news agencies directly.