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Treehugger or petrolhead?: identifying bias by comparing online news articles with political speeches

Published: 16 April 2012 Publication History

Abstract

The Web is a very democratic medium of communication allowing everyone to express his or her opinion about any type of topic. This multitude of voices makes it more and more important to detect bias and help Internet users understand the background of information sources. Political bias of Web sites, articles, or blog posts is hard to identify straightaway. Manual content analysis conducted by experts is the standard way in political and social science to detect this bias. In this paper we present an automated approach relying on methods from information retrieval and corpus statistics to identify biased vocabulary use. As an example, we analyzed 15 years of parliamentary speeches of the German Bundestag and we investigated whether there is bias towards a political party in major national online newspapers and magazines. The results show that bias exists with respect to vocabulary use and it coincides with human judgement.

References

[1]
D. D'Alessio and M. Allen. Media Bias in Presidential Elections: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Communication, Autumn, pages 133--176, 2000.
[2]
Deutscher Bundestag. Stenografische Berichte. Online, January 2011. http://dip.bundestag.de/.
[3]
K. Krippendorff. Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology. Sage Publications, Inc, 1980.
[4]
Redaktion Eigentümlich-Frei. Übersicht: Politisch meinungsbildende Zeitungen und Zeitschriften in deutscher Sprache. Online, December 2009. http://ef-magazin.de/2009/12/23/1761-uebersicht-politisch-meinungsbildende-zeitungen-und-zeitschriften-in-deutscher-sprache.

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  • (2022)Data-driven analysis and prediction of norm acceptanceInformatik Spektrum10.1007/s00287-022-01472-145:4(240-245)Online publication date: 20-Jul-2022
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  1. Treehugger or petrolhead?: identifying bias by comparing online news articles with political speeches

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '12 Companion: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on World Wide Web
    April 2012
    1250 pages
    ISBN:9781450312301
    DOI:10.1145/2187980

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    • Univ. de Lyon: Universite de Lyon

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 16 April 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. bias detection
    2. news analysis
    3. vector space model

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    • Poster

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    WWW 2012
    Sponsor:
    • Univ. de Lyon
    WWW 2012: 21st World Wide Web Conference 2012
    April 16 - 20, 2012
    Lyon, France

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)A systematic review on media bias detection: What is media bias, how it is expressed, and how to detect itExpert Systems with Applications10.1016/j.eswa.2023.121641237(121641)Online publication date: Mar-2024
    • (2023)Stop the War, for Godsake!: A Text Analysis of Speeches of Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian PresidentInternational Journal of Public Administration10.1080/01900692.2023.219917447:11(759-777)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2023
    • (2022)Data-driven analysis and prediction of norm acceptanceInformatik Spektrum10.1007/s00287-022-01472-145:4(240-245)Online publication date: 20-Jul-2022
    • (2020)A Survey on Computational PoliticsIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30349838(197379-197406)Online publication date: 2020
    • (2019)A Challenging Dataset for Bias Detection: The Case of the Crisis in the UkraineSocial, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling10.1007/978-3-030-21741-9_18(173-183)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2019
    • (2017)"Them again?"Proceedings of the Eurographics/IEEE VGTC Conference on Visualization: Posters10.2312/eurp.20171173(77-79)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2017
    • (2017)Das Fachgebiet „Informationssysteme“ am Hasso-Plattner-InstitutDatenbank-Spektrum10.1007/s13222-016-0239-017:1(69-76)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2017
    • (2016)The Information Systems Group at HPIACM SIGMOD Record10.1145/3003665.300367845:2(63-68)Online publication date: 28-Sep-2016
    • (2012)Opinions network for politically controversial topicsProceedings of the first edition workshop on Politics, elections and data10.1145/2389661.2389668(15-22)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2012

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