Automatic large-scale political bias detection of news outlets

Abstract

Political bias is an inescapable characteristic in news and media reporting, and understanding what political biases people are exposed to when interacting with online news is of crucial import. However, quantifying political bias is problematic. To systematically study the political biases of online news, much of previous research has used human-labelled databases. Yet, these databases tend to be costly, and cover only a few thousand instances at most. Additionally, despite the wide recognition that bias can be expressed in a multitude of ways, many have only examined narrow expressions of bias. For example, most have focused on biased wording in news articles, but ignore bias expressed when an outlet avoids reporting on certain topics or events. In this article, we introduce a data-driven approach that uses machine learning techniques to analyse multiple forms of bias, and that can estimate the political leaning of hundreds of thousands of Web domains with high accuracy. Crucially, this approach also allows us to provide detailed explanations for why a news outlet is assigned a particular political bias. Our work thereby presents a scalable and comprehensive approach to studying political bias in news on a larger scale than ever before.