Measuring and Explaining the Diversity of Voices and Viewpoints in the News

Abstract

Fo r m o r e info r m a tio n, in cl u di n g o u r p olicy a n d s u b mi s sio n p r o c e d u r e , pl e a s e c o n t a c t t h e R e p o si to ry Te a m a t: u si r@ s alfo r d. a c. u k. Measuring and explaining the diversity of voices and viewpoints in the news. A comparative study on the determinants of content diversity of immigration news.

Diversity Checker

“…If we can make the traditional assumption that a set of articles is read together, as in a newspaper, each individual article need not be equally balanced, as long as the ensemble is. Indeed, such a pattern was found by Masini et al [23], and was also present in the edition from which the above example was taken. On the other hand, a balance is sought also within individual articles in many journalistic genres.…”

“…Humprecht and Esser [15] note that the understanding of diversity in the news is based on the normative claim that a diversity of perspectives should be offered, which can be gauged by analyzing the diversity of political actors, who are usually deemed to have a leading role in determining the direction of the debate (although of course we will not restrict ourselves to political actors). More broadly, the question of which types of actors' views are represented is an important one [4,23]. For this reason we focus on actor diversity with the current version of our tool, which will be described in more detail in Section 3.…”

The European media discourse on immigration and its effects: a literature review

“…Still, a study of British television programmes indicates an increase in representations of ethnic minorities (Statham, 2002), this may be particularly tied to public broadcasting stations having to abide by normative standards of diversity (see also, Law, Svennevig, & Morrison, 1997;Ruhrmann et al, 2006). In a similar vein, Masini et al (2017) find that the diversity of actors and viewpoints is highest in elite newspapers. Coversely, Gabrielatos and Baker (2008) show that tabloids use nonsensical or strongly negative and biased terms such as 'illegal refugee' or 'bogus refugee' much more often than their broadsheet counterparts do.…”

Do not blame it on the algorithm: an empirical assessment of multiple recommender systems and their impact on content diversity

“…In reality, news content diversity is a far richer, and far more complex phenomenon (see, e.g. Helberger et al, 2018;Sørensen & Schmidt, 2016;Masini et al, 2017;Napoli, 2015). As Van Cuilenburg (1999) puts it, diversity defines the 'heterogeneity of media content in terms of one or more specified characteristics' (p. 188).…”