- The role of the media in shaping public debate on political issues is paramount. News organizations serve as primary sources of information, providing context, analysis, and reporting that influence public perception and opinion.
- However, inherent bias in news publishing can significantly affect the objectivity and comprehensiveness of this debate.
- Bias in the media can manifest in various ways, often driven by factors such as the political agenda of publishers, selective information omission, bot activity, fact-checking practices, and the credibility and orientation of sources.
- These biases can distort the public’s understanding of key political issues and challenge the idea of a well-informed citizenry.
- Web intelligence solutions such as the webLyzard Dashboard allow OSINT decision-makers and analysts to gain insights into the political debate that elicit inherent bias of the sources through a combination of state-of-the-art data science and visualization methods.
- Below are some of the key forms of bias present in news publishing and their impact on political discourse:
- Political Agenda of the Publisher or Owner
- One of the most prominent sources of bias in news publishing is the political agenda of the publisher or the owner of the news outlet. Media ownership can shape the editorial direction, story selection, and framing of news.
- Ownership Influence: The ownership structure of a news organization often reflects particular political ideologies, which can influence editorial decisions. For example, media moguls or corporations with vested interests in certain political outcomes may push for coverage that aligns with their views. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, for example, is widely known for its conservative-leaning editorial stance, which influences the tone and content of outlets like Fox News in the U.S. and The Sun in the U.K. On the opposite side of the spectrum, media companies like the Washington Post or The Guardian have been accused of having a liberal bias in their coverage.
- Editorial Policy: Even in cases where the ownership is not directly involved in day-to-day operations, the editorial policy of the news organization often reflects an underlying political stance. This can manifest in how stories are framed, what sources are cited, and what issues are prioritized or downplayed.
- Omission of Information
- Another common form of bias is the selective omission of information, which can lead to incomplete or skewed narratives. This can happen both intentionally and unintentionally and significantly impacts how the public perceives political issues.
- Selective Reporting: News outlets may omit key details that could provide a fuller understanding of an issue. For example, during political scandals, certain outlets may highlight only the accusations without providing context or potential exonerating information, depending on their political orientation. Alternatively, they may choose to cover some stories extensively while ignoring others of equal importance that do not align with their editorial stance.
- Agenda-Setting: By choosing which stories to report on and which to ignore, media outlets can shape the public agenda. For example, in the lead-up to elections, conservative outlets might focus heavily on issues like immigration and national security, while liberal outlets may prioritize topics like healthcare and climate change. This selective focus can influence the public’s perception of what issues are most important.
- The CRiTERIA analytics dashboard allows to easily inspect a story’s coverage by publication source, country, and language, and thereby surfacing selective reporting and agenda-setting from a top-down perspective.
- Another common form of bias is the selective omission of information, which can lead to incomplete or skewed narratives. This can happen both intentionally and unintentionally and significantly impacts how the public perceives political issues.
- Bot Activity and Manipulation
- Bot activity and social media manipulation are increasingly recognized as significant factors in the dissemination of political news and debate. Automated accounts can flood social media with biased or misleading content, which then gets picked up by news organizations, amplifying the bias.
- Bot Networks: Bots can be used to artificially inflate the popularity of certain viewpoints or news stories, making them appear more widely accepted or significant than they actually are. This creates a false sense of consensus, influencing both public opinion and the editorial choices of news outlets that monitor trending topics.
- Astroturfing: This is a technique where bot activity is used to create the appearance of grassroots support for a political position, when in fact the support is orchestrated by organized interests. News outlets might report on these manufactured trends as though they represent genuine public sentiment, further distorting the political debate.
- Bot activity can be detected and mitigated from an analytics perspective through means of content deduplication and duplicate tracing across sources and languages, allowing the analyst to understand the actors and catalysts in story multiplication.
- Fact-Checking and Verification
- The processes of fact-checking and verification are critical to maintaining journalistic integrity, but they are also subject to bias. How and when facts are checked, and the sources used for verification, can introduce slants into the reporting.
- Selective Fact-Checking: Media organizations may selectively fact-check certain claims based on their political bias. For example, a left-leaning publication may be more inclined to scrutinize statements made by conservative politicians, while a right-leaning outlet might focus on fact-checking the opposition. This selective approach can lead to an imbalance in how political figures and policies are represented in the public debate.
- Fact-Checking Organizations: Even fact-checking organizations themselves can be biased. While many strive for impartiality, the choice of what to fact-check, the interpretation of statements, and the presentation of findings can be influenced by the political orientation of the organization or its funding sources. Organizations like PolitiFact and Snopes have been praised for their efforts in maintaining objectivity but have also faced criticism for perceived biases depending on the political issue at hand.
- Source Credibility and Orientation
- The credibility and political orientation of sources cited by news organizations play a crucial role in the framing of political debates. Different sources can offer vastly different interpretations of the same event, depending on their own biases.
- Credibility of Sources: Not all sources are equally reliable or objective, yet news outlets often rely on them for quotes, analysis, and data. The use of think tanks, advocacy groups, or experts with a known political bias can influence the tone and conclusions of the reporting. For example, citing a conservative think tank like The Heritage Foundation or a liberal one like The Center for American Progress can shape the framing of economic or policy debates in very different ways.
- Balance of Sources: The choice of sources is also critical to maintaining a balanced debate. News outlets that consistently cite sources from only one side of the political spectrum contribute to echo chambers, where only one viewpoint is reinforced. Balanced reporting should include perspectives from across the spectrum, but bias often leads to an over-reliance on ideologically aligned sources.
- In CRiTERIA, project partner IDIAP trained an innovative classification system that assigns credibility scores to content publishers based on their co-mention network with reputable sources, allowing the analyst to efficiently rank content by source credibility.
- The presence of bias in news publishing has significant implications for the public debate on political issues. It can lead to polarization, where individuals are only exposed to information that reinforces their preexisting views. This echo chamber effect can deepen divisions within society and make compromise and consensus-building more difficult.
- Furthermore, bias can erode trust in the media. When news consumers perceive that media outlets are driven by political agendas, they may become sceptical of all reporting, leading to a decline in the perceived legitimacy of journalism as an institution. This is particularly dangerous in a democratic society, where an informed citizenry is essential for the functioning of government and public discourse.
- A more nuanced approach to media consumption, combined with an awareness of these biases, is essential for fostering a more informed and balanced political debate. Analytics tools can help to surface inherent bias within the public debate.
- Political Agenda of the Publisher or Owner
Resources
Media Ownership and Political Influence
Bagdikian, B.H. (2004). The New Media Monopoly. Beacon Press. This book explores how media ownership concentration affects news reporting and political bias.
McChesney, R.W. (1999). Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. University of Illinois Press. This work examines the impact of corporate ownership on media content.
Selective Omission and Agenda-Setting
McCombs, M.E., & Shaw, D.L. (1972). The agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media. Public Opinion Quarterly. This foundational study explains how media shapes public perceptions by focusing on certain issues over others.
Entman, R.M. (1993). Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal of Communication. This paper explains how media frames issues, influencing how they are understood by the public.
Bot Activity and Social Media Manipulation
Woolley, S.C., & Howard, P.N. (2016). Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents – Introduction. International Journal of Communication. This paper discusses how bots are used to manipulate political communication online.
Bradshaw, S., & Howard, P.N. (2018). Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation. Oxford Internet Institute. This report examines global trends in social media manipulation.
Fact-Checking and Media Bias
Graves, L. (2016). Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism. Columbia University Press. This book analyzes the rise of fact-checking organizations and the inherent biases that come with them.
Marietta, M., & Barker, D.C. (2018). Fact-Checking Polarization: Does the Fact-Checking Process Widen The Partisan Gap? The Forum. This article examines how fact-checking can influence political polarization.
Source Credibility and Political Orientation
Lichter, S.R., Rothman, S., & Lichter, L.S. (1990). The Media Elite: America’s New Powerbrokers. Adler & Adler. This book explores the political orientations of journalists and their influence on news content.
Pew Research Center (2020). U.S. Media Polarization and the 2020 Election: A Nation Divided. This report provides insights into media polarization and source credibility in the U.S. media landscape.
