Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media Bias Through Crowdsourced Content Analysis

Budak, Ceren; Goel, Sharad; Rao, Justin M.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2526461

Cited by 87 publications

(139 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Overall, our results appear to indicate that the North American news media is largely prone to report dramatic, high‐consequence, human tragedy stories about bears, and while bears as front‐page news may initially be perceived to be a positive signal for conservation, the negative connotations repeatedly associated with these narratives are likely to heighten fear and risk perceptions (Budak, Goel, & Rao, ; Downs, ; Lakoff, ; Muter et al, ; Pepin‐Neff & Wynter, ). In turn, this might influence support for less desirable conservation interventions, such as lethal “problem bear” control or relocation, rather than seeking to shift human behaviors to work toward coexistence (Hathaway et al, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

From human invaders to problem bears: A media content analysis of grizzly bear conservation

Hughes

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Yarmey

et al. 2020

Conservat Sci and Prac

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Across their North American range, grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) occupy a special place in human imagination, as icons of nature's rugged and raw power, to representations of safety risks and economic costs of living with carnivores. Different bear representations can also be found across news media, from controversial and sensational descriptions of attacks, tragic events and conflicts, to scientific accounts of conservation research. News media certainly has the power to pique curiosity, spark debate, or elicit emotional responses through framing and repetition of content. In turn, news stories can influence how people might interpret and internalize information about grizzly bears. Using media content analysis, we examined newsprint stories on grizzly bears across their North American range between 2000 and 2016, to understand message framing and attention cycle, as well as attitudinal expression and representative anecdote conveyed to the readership. We found that human–bear conflict stories are over‐reported compared to other narratives, where a single incidence garners more attention than a story about new scientific findings. We also found articles that included hunting frames largely originated in Alberta, likely due to the threatened species listing and hunting moratorium. Attitudinal expressions included ecological, negative or neutral, and moral sentiments toward bears. The most common representative anecdote conveyed to the readership reflected the dire state faced by grizzly bears. The bear eco‐gossip expressed in the articles we reviewed, which included clear protagonists and antagonists and the occasional man‐bites‐bear surprise, appears to be the diet of manufactured information fed to the public. Results of our study can help scientists and conservationists understand how news media portrays grizzly bears to the public and how this might influence public sentiment toward their conservation, but also identifies the roles that scientists, conservationists and journalists together can play in crafting effective, factual and engaging news stories about bears.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

From human invaders to problem bears: A media content analysis of grizzly bear conservation

Hughes

Foote

Yarmey

et al. 2020

Conservat Sci and Prac

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“…However, their definition of bias is typically grounded in how a reader perceives the ideological leaning of the article and news outlet, whereas our informational bias centers around the media's sentiment towards individual entities. Furthermore, while previous work mostly uses all articles published by a news outlet to estimate their ideology (Budak et al, 2016), we focus on stories of the same events reported by different outlets.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…BASIL contains 100 triplets of articles, each with 3 articles about the same main event from the New York Times (NYT), Fox News (FOX), and the Huffington Post (HPO). According to Budak et al (2016), FOX is considered strongly right leaning, NYT slightly left leaning, and HPO strongly left leaning. As an initial annotation set, 16 triplets of highly visible, polarizing events were directly selected from the media source websites by our annotators.…”

Section: B Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

In Plain Sight: Media Bias Through the Lens of Factual Reporting

Fan¹,

White²,

Sharma

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conferen

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The increasing prevalence of political bias in news media calls for greater public awareness of it, as well as robust methods for its detection. While prior work in NLP has primarily focused on the lexical bias captured by linguistic attributes such as word choice and syntax, other types of bias stem from the actual content selected for inclusion in the text. In this work, we investigate the effects of informational bias: factual content that can nevertheless be deployed to sway reader opinion. We first produce a new dataset, BASIL, of 300 news articles annotated with 1,727 bias spans 1 and find evidence that informational bias appears in news articles more frequently than lexical bias. We further study our annotations to observe how informational bias surfaces in news articles by different media outlets. Lastly, a baseline model for informational bias prediction is presented by finetuning BERT on our labeled data, indicating the challenges of the task and future directions.

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“…There is some discussion as to whether NYT is a liberal news outlet. We rely on the argument made by Budak, Goel, and Roa (), who found that the NYT had liberal slant; even compared with comparable news outlets such as BBC News and CNN.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Partisan Provocation: The Role of Partisan News Use and Emotional Responses in Political Information Sharing in Social Media

2016

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Citizens increasingly rely on social media to consume and disseminate news and information about politics, but the factors that drive political information sharing on these sites are not well understood. This study focused on how online partisan news use influences political information sharing in part because of the distinct negative emotions it arouses in its audience. Using panel survey data collected during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, we found that use of proattitudinal partisan news online is associated with increased anger, but not anxiety, directed at the opposing party's presidential candidate and that anger subsequently facilitated information sharing about the election on social media. The results suggest partisan media may drive online information sharing by generating anger in its audience.

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Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media Bias Through Crowdsourced Content Analysis

Cited by 87 publications

References 33 publications

From human invaders to problem bears: A media content analysis of grizzly bear conservation

From human invaders to problem bears: A media content analysis of grizzly bear conservation

In Plain Sight: Media Bias Through the Lens of Factual Reporting

Partisan Provocation: The Role of Partisan News Use and Emotional Responses in Political Information Sharing in Social Media

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