Quantifying Perceived Political Bias of Newspapers through a Document Classification Technique

Abstract

ABSTRACT Even though a certain degree of political bias is unavoidable in the media, strong media bias is likely to have an impact on society, especially on the formation of public opinion. This research proposes a data-driven method for quantifying political bias of media contents. With a document classification technique called doc2vec and social data from Facebook posts, a model for analysing the bias is developed. By applying the model to contents of major South Korean newspapers, this paper demonstrates quantitatively that significant political bias exists in the newspapers in line with the perceived political bias.