Paper:
Ceren Budak, Sharad Goel, Justin M. Rao; Fair and Balanced? Quantifying Media Bias through Crowdsourced Content Analysis (Links to an external site.), Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 80, Issue S1, 1 January 2016, Pages 250–271.
Discussion Leader:
Lawrence
Summary:
We all believe that certain news organizations have a certain agenda they try to push but there is no real way to quantify it since it would be easy to add personal bias to a situation. According to this paper however, through the combination of machine learning and crowd sourced work, selection and framing characteristics can be brought to light. Judging fifteen media outlets and using 749 human judges, over 110,000 articles were classified as political out of over 800,000 in order to find out that with the exception of certain types of news reports (mostly political scandals) most major news operations give an unbiased opinion and in the event of a political scandal, organizations tend to criticize the opposing ideology rather than directly advocating for whatever they believe.
On a scale of -1 to 1, news organizations were graded based on how much slant they had to either the left of right respectively. News stories were surprisingly closely slanted as opposed to opinion based stories. Outside of the blog sites, results were as close as 0.16 points apart (out of 2).
Reflections:
For the first time it has been shown with numbers that there is a difference between news reports regarding articles of an opinionated nature. This study helps to point out the fact that there are several instances which are not giving pure information to viewers. It is a good starting point for recognizing and categorizing media bias on either political side. The issues of not being well informed of both sides of an issue however are much more apparent since there is now a way to clearly define the line between what news you here and what news is available. My biggest criticism is that there was a complaint about how much more time was needed to properly run the study, and as there was no one else running a similar study, I think they could have taken the time they needed. They went through over 800,000 articles and then complained about the amount of time they had left to run the study but I was unable to find any sort of follow up.
There was also a great deal of room for error as users were at times, only given 3 choices of the correct answer. This means there is a 66% chance that the answer was not the favorable answer but 33% is still a big chance of guessing correctly.
Questions:
- Since there is an actual line which divides left and right news feeds, would it benefit a viewer to watch a news feed which opposes their own views?
- Was it a surprise that non opinion based news fell closer to neutral on both sides?
- Is it the responsibility of a news network to make sure they are being neutral in the information they give to their viewers?
