Does ideology affect the tone of international news coverage?

Abstract

Tone of a news report is intimately related to the topic of the article, and therefore can reflect the attitude of journalists or media. It is often thought that tone of news report, especially the international news, is affected by ideology. To test whether this is the case, we use GDELT (Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone) to compare the tone of international news reports among nine countries, the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany, China, Nigeria, Argentina, Zimbabwe and United Arab Emirates. We find that albeit international news reported by different countries differ significantly in event types, they nevertheless converge in tone. The former reflects the different preferences in content selection by each country, and thus reflect culture. The convergence in tone reflects the fact that reporters are not overly influenced by their respective ideology; rather they share to a large degree some universal values when covering international news.