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Tracing Political Positioning of Dutch Newspapers

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Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13545 ))

Abstract

Newspapers write for a particular readership and from a certain ideological or political perspective. This paper applies various natural language processing methods to newspaper articles to analyse to which extent the ideological positioning of newspapers is reflected in their writing. Political bias is illustrated in terms of coverage bias and agenda setting by means of metrics, LDA topic modelling and word embeddings. Furthermore, article source discrimination is analysed by applying various classification models. Finally, the use of generative models (GPT-2) is explored for this purpose. These analyses showed several indications of political tendencies: disproportionate coverage of certain politicians and parties, limited overlap of political discourse, classifiable article source and divergence of generated text thematically and in terms of sentiment. Therefore, reading a newspaper requires a critical attitude which considers the intricate political tendencies of the source.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Visualisation of the position of media on a political bias and news value scale by Vanessa Otero https://adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc.

  2. 2.

    Sample code for data collection and analysis can be found at: https://github.com/Chris-Congleton/MSc-Thesis.

  3. 3.

    The parties, party leaders and number of seats in the 2021 Tweede Kamer can be found at: https://www.kiesraad.nl/actueel/nieuws/2021/03/26/officiele-uitslag-tweede-kamerverkiezing-17-maart-2021.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leiden University, Niels Bohrweg 1, 2333, Leiden, CA, The Netherlands

    Christopher Congleton, Peter van der Putten & Suzan Verberne

Authors
  1. Christopher Congleton
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  2. Peter van der Putten
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  3. Suzan Verberne
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Peter van der Putten or Suzan Verberne .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

    Francesca Spezzano

  2. Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, São Leopoldo, Brazil

    Adriana Amaral

  3. Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Davide Ceolin

  4. Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

    Lisa Fazio

  5. Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

    Edoardo Serra

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Congleton, C., van der Putten, P., Verberne, S. (2022). Tracing Political Positioning of Dutch Newspapers. In: Spezzano, F., Amaral, A., Ceolin, D., Fazio, L., Serra, E. (eds) Disinformation in Open Online Media. MISDOOM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13545 . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18253-2_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18253-2_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-18252-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-18253-2

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