On your way through the labyrinth you find yourself standing before two doors, each flanked by a guard – one door leads to freedom, the other to certain doom. One of these guards always tells the truth and the other is compelled to lie. You are permitted one question to ascertain the safe path. What do you ask?
This classic logic puzzle (and particular favourite movie scene from my childhood) has an elegant solution. You ask either guard: “Which door would the other guard tell me leads to freedom?” You then enter the opposite door. The truth-teller will honestly report the liar’s deceptive response, while the liar will falsely report the truth-teller’s correct answer. In both scenarios, you are pointed toward the door of doom, and your path to freedom lies in rejecting that answer. This riddle has a profound lesson: truth is not found in seeking a consensus or averaging out conflicting accounts. It is revealed by precise, well-formulated questioning that gets to the truth.
This age-old puzzle has relevance in our modern information ecosystem, its own Labyrinth which some refuse to enter for fear of getting lost.
Now a word from our sponsor
In today’s hyper-partisan world, it’s more important than ever to be able to step outside of your own news bubble. That’s why I use Ground News. It allows me to see how the same story is being framed by outlets all across the political spectrum, so I can get a more complete and nuanced understanding of what’s really happening. For example, with the recent [insert current event], Ground News’ ‘Blindspot’ feature showed me that sources on the right were focusing heavily on one aspect of the story, while those on the left were ignoring it almost entirely. That’s a crucial piece of the puzzle that I would have missed otherwise.
(Full disclosure – Ground News does not sponsor this article, nor does the author or publisher endorse Ground News)
If you’ve spent any time on YouTube recently, you will have been exposed to ad copy like this. Into the fray steps Ground News, a news aggregator promising to be our guide through the media Labyrinth by pooling thousands of global news sources and displaying how outlets from across the political spectrum (left, centre, and right) are covering a given event.
The stated goal is to help users escape their echo chambers and find the truth. But the first question this raises is, who is this really for? Hardened ideologues are unlikely to engage with challenging views, while dedicated skeptics often prefer to bypass curated narratives in favour of primary sources. This leaves Ground News in a curious position, seemingly targeting an open-minded user in the middle. But for this discerning audience, does the platform’s methodology truly lead to clarity, or merely build a more ornate labyrinth?
Ground News’ core feature is that viewing a spectrum of biases allows a user to get a more complete and nuanced understanding of world events. However, in the Labyrinth analogy, this is the informational equivalent of trying to find the average between the two guards’ answers – leaving the user stranded in the Labyrinth. And for those who feel that news is too polarised and come to Ground News to remedy this, it only helps to reinforce this discomfort with news media.
Furthermore, presenting falsehoods and facts on a level playing field, distinguished only by a political label, creates a dangerous false equivalence. This illusion of “balance” can elevate fringe ideas or disinformation to the same level as evidence-based reporting. For anyone educated in evaluating the quality of evidence, to distinguish between a peer-reviewed meta-analysis and a contrarian op-ed using a system that primarily categorises information by political leaning is a step backward. The most crucial metric isn’t a position on a left-right axis, but each news article’s methodological rigor, transparency, and accuracy.
Consider a report on the efficacy of an mRNA vaccine. The crucial data points are the outcomes of clinical trials, the statistical significance of the findings, and the calculated relative risk reduction. Yet, if this information is published by a source Ground News labels “left-leaning”, a segment of users may dismiss the data outright as partisan spin. Conversely, if a “right-leaning” outlet reports on inflation figures that align with government-issued economic data, it might be ignored by those who distrust that source’s political ideology. In the Labyrinth, and our two-guard riddle, focusing on whether you like the look of a guard is a fatal distraction. In the same way, Ground News’ framework can distract from the only question that matters: is the information accurate and the methodology sound?
To give Ground News their due, they do try to offer transparency in the news by evaluating the ownership of outlets – a feature available on their most expensive subscription plan – which appear as a very reductive version of Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent model of news propaganda. There is also a factuality score beneath each article, available in the mid-tier subscription plan and above, which doesn’t offer any analysis of the truth for any particular article. In Ground News’ own words:
Outlets are evaluated based on their use of credible sources, timeliness of corrections, and whether their reporting adds layers of context. Scores apply to each publication as a whole, not to their individual articles.
Can we solve the two-guards riddle if one of the guards is generally truthful and not always truthful?
The major flaw in Ground News’ model is that it mistakes the map of the Labyrinth for the actual terrain of the Labyrinth. Their solution is not to help discover the layout of the Labyrinth, but to sell you more maps. The collection of the left, right, and centre narratives are the maps – a series of interpretations, framings, and spins. The terrain is the truth; the data, the primary sources, the verifiable facts. Ground News offers an exhaustive atlas of (mostly AI-aggregated) maps but doesn’t offer any way to help the user solve the Labyrinth.
The solution to the two-guards riddle requires a moment of meta-cognition. You cannot simply ask “Which way is freedom?” You must ask a question about the system itself – a question that accounts for the biases of these two guards. Likewise, the solution to navigating our media Labyrinth is not simply to consume a balanced diet of biases. It is to develop the skills to question the framework, to demand primary evidence, and to evaluate the methodology behind a claim, regardless of the political affiliation of its source.
Ground News provides a fascinating academic overview of the media chaos. But the riddle teaches us that seeing the chaos is not the same as navigating it. The path to freedom – to truth – is not found by standing paralysed between two conflicting answers from the guards. It is found by asking the smarter question, interrogating the source, and bravely walking the path paved with evidence.
