In Plain Sight: Media Bias Through the Lens of Factual Reporting

Lisa Fan, Marshall White, Eva Sharma, Ruisi Su, Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Ruihong Huang, Lu Wang

Abstract
The increasing prevalence of political bias in news media calls for greater public awareness of it, as well as robust methods for its detection. While prior work in NLP has primarily focused on the lexical bias captured by linguistic attributes such as word choice and syntax, other types of bias stem from the actual content selected for inclusion in the text. In this work, we investigate the effects of informational bias: factual content that can nevertheless be deployed to sway reader opinion. We first produce a new dataset, BASIL, of 300 news articles annotated with 1,727 bias spans and find evidence that informational bias appears in news articles more frequently than lexical bias. We further study our annotations to observe how informational bias surfaces in news articles by different media outlets. Lastly, a baseline model for informational bias prediction is presented by fine-tuning BERT on our labeled data, indicating the challenges of the task and future directions.
Anthology ID:
D19-1664
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6343–6349
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1664
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1664
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lisa Fan, Marshall White, Eva Sharma, Ruisi Su, Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Ruihong Huang, and Lu Wang. 2019. In Plain Sight: Media Bias Through the Lens of Factual Reporting. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 6343–6349, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
In Plain Sight: Media Bias Through the Lens of Factual Reporting (Fan et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ml4al-ingestion/D19-1664.pdf
Attachment:
 D19-1664.Attachment.zip
Code
 marshallwhiteorg/emnlp19-media-bias
Data
BASIL
PDF Search Code Attachment