British Bulletin Bias

‘There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.’ -Walter Lippmann

While mainstream media has been around for years, the digital age allows for media concerns to increase societal impact. Although objectivity is regarded as the mainstay of modern-day reporting, news commercialisation and economic and political interests of media corporations raise questions on how neutral journalists are in fulfilling their job as the fourth estate. In an era where news and opinion making reaches individuals in an increasingly tailor-made fashion, news neutrality has never been less of a luxury. As journalist and media critic Walter Lippmann wrote in his 1920 work ‘Liberty and the News’:

‘There can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.’

In this project, data analysis is performed on quotation data of twenty-one major British news sources, in order to gain insight on their neutrality.

Uk Media Landscape in 2020

Since the first news and gossip papers during the 17th century, technology made UK journalism an ever changing industry. Since then, journalism changed from a mainly written field to a multi-platformed discipline where radio, television, The Internet, computers and mobile devices made it possible to stay ever-informed. According to research done by Ofcom¹, UK’s communications regulator, television was still the most used platform for news consumption in the UK during 2020, with Internet and social media closely following with 65% and 45%, respectively.

Usage of UK media platforms in 2020: Internet includes use of social media, podcasts and all other websites/apps accessed via any device, other websites/apps includes any non-social media internet source (including podcasts for the first time in 2020)

In this project it was chosen to measure news neutrality in the UK specifically, to narrow down the field of research. The UK has a, mainly, two-party system where parliament is dominated by the Labour and Conservative party. This could be seen as converting research on political neutrality to binary values, which makes it sufficiently easier.

An extra advantage of the UK as a country of research is the fact that the country has a state-owned news source, the BBC. Findings on neutrality could be remarkably more interesting taking this into account, since one would expect a public service company to be especially truthful and impartial.

Previously done research in the domain of news neutrality gives a baseline to which results can be compared to. In a survey by YouGov² in 2017, 2040 people were asked to label newspapers based on how left or rightwing they appear them to be. Some of these newspapers coincide with the ones in our research.

A look into this data, gives a first impression on how left- or right-wing certain papers appear to be.

Is there a reason for the fact that The Guardian has a left-wing reputation? Can we draw a line on which newspapers have similar ideologies? Is the media as biased as people might think it is?

“Daily mail and Daily Express keep up a right-wing reputation, The Guardian and The Mirror leave left-wing impressions.”

*People who answered ‘Don’t know’ are omitted, between 39% - 49% of respondents. **The data was used as used by the YouGovpaper, the bars don’t always sum up to 100 due to what appears to be rounding errors. It was decided not to fix this to not alter the data.

The Data

Although the UK media landscape contains multiple news sources, we’re focusing on 21 newspapers. These newspapers are some of the biggest and most influential ones, but the main reason for choosing them was the number of quotes in the original dataset, Quotebank. For all the years, the following pie chart diagram shows the percentage of quotes from each newspaper.

“A dataset of quotes containing quotes from the BBC, Belfast Live, Birmingham Mail, Daily Mail, Daily Record, Daily Star, Digital Spy, Daily Express, The Herald, The Independent, I, Liverpool Echo, Manchester Evening News, Daily Mirror, Sky UK, London Evening Standard, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Sun, The Times and Wales Online.”

Unsurprisingly, the number of quotes differ a lot between the newspapers. This could be due to differences in volume, but also the urge to insert quotes into newspaper articles.

Percentage of total number of quotes, summarized over all years.

Analysis of political speakers

In the animation it can be seen how the number of quotes made by conservative and labour speakers for each newspaper changed over the years. A few general observations could be made: In 2015, a majority of the newspapers quoted more labour speakers but then a shift could be observed.

“In 2015, a majority of the newspapers quoted more labour speakers but then a shift could be observed.”

In 2016 about half of the newspapers quoted more labour, and the other half more convervative. From 2017, a majority quoted more conservative speakers instead. BBC and Independent followed this trend, quoting more labour in 2015 but more conservative thereafter. It could be noted that a few of the newspapers quoted more labour speakers after 2015 as well, especially Daily Record which did it all years. Also, Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo and Wales online quoted more labour speakers for most years.

It was not easy to find any patterns when clustering the speaker frequency matrix using K-means. Trying something different, the speaker frequency matrix was projected onto a 2-dimensional space. Just to make the plot more interpretable, each newspaper was given a political stance according to the survey from 2017 made by YouGov, if applicable. Even when doing this, there is no clear pattern for any of the years. The newspapers move around over the map, having different neighbours each year.

Sentiment analysis of speakers

A common view on news nowadays is that its reporting always tends to be negatively biased. By doing sentiment analysis on all available quotes over all papers the contrary could be concluded: newspapers appear to report more positive than negative quotes. Although most quotes are noted to be neutral, the positive class is on general larger than the negative one.

“In general newspapers report more in a positive manner, than in a negative one.”

This could contradict the popular idea that news is reported with a negative bias, always containing negative information.

Total amount of quotes with positive, neutral or negative sentiment for each newspaper.

This animation shows the mean sentiment for all quotes made by connservative respective labour speakers for each newspaper. Each quote was given a sentiment of 1,2,3, where 1 is positive, 2 neutral and 3 negative. It can be seen that the values are quite even and close to neutral, and as it was noted in the general case above, on average the quotes seem more positive than negative. Over the years, the sentiment was slightly more positive for the conservative party in general. A few of the newspapers had more positive sentiment for labour speaker quotes, but not for all years.

Trying to cluster based on these sentiment values, no clear pattern could be found. The sentiment values for quotes in each party is therefore concluded to be of no interest regarding neutrality of newspapers.

Analysis of stance towards specific topics

Heatmap showing the mean number of mentioned political topics per newspaper over the years. Normalization has been made over the rows, so that the columns sum to 100% for each newspaper.

Some subjects are usually polarized in society, and this holds for the political landscape in the UK as well. Such topics include Climate change, Brexit, Immigration, Healthcare, Education, War, Crime and the Monarchy. It is therefore interesting to analyze the mentionings of these subjects in the chosen newspapers.

In this case there are some patterns, but all newspapers follow it and there is no clear division between them. For example war related topics were quoted the most for all newspapers. Health care and crime related topics are also quoted a lot, while climate change is the overall most unpopular.

Conclusion and takeaways

Although initial surveys and intuition made belief that UK newspapers would be prone to being biased and partial, this research could not strongly confirm that belief.

Although it differs from year to year, British newspapers do not seem to strongly favor one political party over another in terms of the amount of quotations they grant them.

Clustering on the frequency of speaker quotation, led to highly varying results from year to year and the achieved clusters weren’t in line with the initial division based on the YouGov research.

Sentiment analysis did not bring strong evidence papers would quote one party in a more positive manner than the other, although it seemed like Labour would get quoted slightly more positive than conservative overall.

A nice extra takeaway is that newspapers are not as pessimistic as one might think. Most news appears to be neutral after doing sentiment analysis and when leaving the neutral ones out, the positive quoations are more abundant than the negative ones.

On a topic basis, no big differences are to be seen. All papers seem to favor about the same topics in general.

Further research is for sure necessary, but this initial research seems to show in a numerical way how British media is being wrongly portrayed as biased.

[SOURCES]: ¹https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/tv-radio-and-on-demand/news-media/news-consumption ²https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2017/03/07/how-left-or-right-wing-are-uks-newspapers