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