In this book, scholars examine the many prevailing arguments about media bias from a non-polemical perspective. Essays cover individual forms of bias, including ideology, politics, television, photography, religion, abortion, homosexuality, gender, race, crime, environment, region, military, corporate ownership, labor and health. Each essay introduces the topic, presents arguments for and against the specific bias, assesses the evidence for all arguments, and includes a list of suggested readings. Two additional essays discuss the broader aspects of the bias debate and give a personal perspective on reporting the controversial Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Explores the past, present, and future to shed light on complex, high-priority public policy. Offers the pros and cons of each issue with opinions from social policy experts.

The media plays an important role in contemporary society - and in contemporary debate. Today, the traditional accusations of a liberal bias in media are accompanied by worries of a rise in right-wing media outlets and the stifling effects of corporate media ownership. This book examines theses changes and more. Ages 16+

What is media bias? Are all media outlets inherently biased? What does it mean for the news we receive? Media bias is a hot topic in the twenty-first century, when everyone and anyone can start a media organization and present content as news, but is all news created equal? Through critical essays and input from media insiders and watchdogs, students will explore what media bias is, how it affects the news they read and watch, and what they can do to make sure that they're not swayed by media bias when they ingest news.

In recent years, the importance of disseminating the findings of social research has been given increased emphasis. The most effective way in which this can be done is via the mass media. However, there are frequent complaints that media coverage of social and educational research is very limited and often distorted. Through a detailed analysis of a particular case about ethnic inequalities in educational achievement, this book examines some of the processes involved in the reporting of research findings, and their implications for judgements about media distortion and bias. This volume is relevant to many fields, including education, media studies, cultural studies, sociology and social policy.

Although news outlets are meant to be impartial, they have never been perfectly unbiased. Another layer was added to the ongoing debate over the role of news media after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when allegations of fake news surfaced. How can people know which news sources to trust? This volume explores the fake news phenomenon and offers readers tips on how to be critical of what they see reported. Full-color photographs, engaging sidebars, and discussion questions enhance the compelling text as it explores this crucial aspect of a democratic society.

Accusations of partisan bias in Presidential election coverage are suspect at best and self-serving at worst. They are generally supported by the methodology of instance confirmation, tainted by the hostile media effect, and based on simplistic visions of how the news media are organized. Media Bias in Presidential Election Coverage 1948-2008 by Dave D'Alessio, is a revealing analysis that shows the news media have four essential natures: as journalistic entities, businesses, political actors, and property, all of which can act to create news coverage biases, in some cases in opposing directions. By meta-analyzing the results of 99 previous examinations of media coverage of Presidential elections from 1948 to 2008, D'Alessio reveals that coverage has no aggregate partisan bias either way, even though there are small biases in specific realms that are generally insubstantial. Furthermore, while publishers used to control coverage preferences, this practice has become negligible in recent years. Media Bias proves that, at least in terms of Presidential election coverage, The New York Times is not the most liberal paper in America and the Fox News channel is substantially more conservative in news coverage than the broadcast networks. Finally, Media Bias in Presidential Election Coverage 1948-2008 predicts that no amount of evidence will cause political candidates to cease complaining about bias because such accusations have both strategic potential in campaigns and an undeniable utility in ego defense.

This open access book presents an interdisciplinary approach to reveal biases in English news articles reporting on a given political event. The approach named person-oriented framing analysis identifies the coverage’s different perspectives on the event by assessing how articles portray the persons involved in the event. In contrast to prior automated approaches, the identified frames are more meaningful and substantially present in person-oriented news coverage. The book is structured in seven chapters: Chapter 1 presents a few of the severe problems caused by slanted news coverage and identifies the research gap that motivated the research described in this thesis. Chapter 2 discusses manual analysis concepts and exemplary studies from the social sciences and automated approaches, mostly from computer science and computational linguistics, to analyze and reveal media bias. This way, it identifies the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches for identifying and revealing media bias. Chapter 3 discusses the solution design space to address the identified research gap and introduces person-oriented framing analysis (PFA), a new approach to identify substantial frames and to reveal slanted news coverage. Chapters 4 and 5 detail target concept analysis and frame identification, the first and second component of PFA. Chapter 5 also introduces the first large-scale dataset and a novel model for target-dependent sentiment classification (TSC) in the news domain. Eventually, Chapter 6 introduces Newsalyze, a prototype system to reveal biases to non-expert news consumers by using the PFA approach. In the end, Chapter 7 summarizes the thesis and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the thesis to derive ideas for future research on media bias. This book mainly targets researchers and graduate students from computer science, computational linguistics, political science, and further social sciences who want to get an overview of the relevant state of the art in the other related disciplines and understand and tackle the issue of bias from a more effective, interdisciplinary viewpoint.

In a democratic society, the role of the press is usually characterized by neutrality and the necessity of an informed electorate. The journalist's ethic is to present facts with minimal interpretation. Over the decades, however, this strict code has evolved and opened up, and thanks to the internet, an alternative media has risen. This has led to accusations of media bias and condemnation of certain media outlets by powerful elected leaders. The viewpoints in this volume explore the obligations of the media, the rise of satirical news outlets, and how to interpret news in a post-fact era.

Media bias has been a hot-button issue for several decades and it features prominently in the post-2016 political conversation. Yet, it receives only spotty treatment in existing materials aimed at political communication or introductory American politics courses. Evaluating Media Bias is a brief, supplemental resource that provides an academically informed but broadly accessible overview of the major concepts and controversies involving media bias. Adam Schiffer explores the contours of the partisan-bias debate before pivoting to real biases: the patterns, constraints, and shortcomings plaguing American political news. Media bias is more relevant than ever in the aftermath of the presidential election, which launched a flurry of media criticism from scholars, commentators, and thoughtful news professionals. Engaging and informative, this text reviews what we know about media bias, offers timely case studies as illustration, and introduces an original framework for unifying diverse conversations about this topic that is the subject of so much ire in our country. Evaluating Media Bias allows students of American politics, and politically aware citizens alike, the means of detecting and evaluating bias for themselves, and thus join the national conversation about the state of American news media.