How to Effectively Identify and Communicate Person-Targeting Media Bias in Daily News Consumption?

Slanted news coverage strongly affects public opinion. This is especially true for coverage on politics and related issues, where studies have shown that bias in the news may influence elections and other collective decisions. Due to its viable importance, news coverage has long been studied in the...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2021-10
Main Authors: Hamborg, Felix, Spinde, Timo, Kim Heinser, Donnay, Karsten, Gipp, Bela
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bias
Content analysis
Cost analysis
Elections
Interdisciplinary studies
Media coverage
News media
Visibility
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Slanted news coverage strongly affects public opinion. This is especially true for coverage on politics and related issues, where studies have shown that bias in the news may influence elections and other collective decisions. Due to its viable importance, news coverage has long been studied in the social sciences, resulting in comprehensive models to describe it and effective yet costly methods to analyze it, such as content analysis. We present an in-progress system for news recommendation that is the first to automate the manual procedure of content analysis to reveal person-targeting biases in news articles reporting on policy issues. In a large-scale user study, we find very promising results regarding this interdisciplinary research direction. Our recommender detects and reveals substantial frames that are actually present in individual news articles. In contrast, prior work rather only facilitates the visibility of biases, e.g., by distinguishing left- and right-wing outlets. Further, our study shows that recommending news articles that differently frame an event significantly improves respondents' awareness of bias.
ISSN:2331-8422