Omission of Information: Identifying Political Slant via an Analysis of Co-occurring Entities
Abstract
Due to the strong impact the news have on society, the detection and analysis of bias within the media are important topics. Most approaches to bias detection focus on linguistic forms of bias or the evaluation and tracing of sources. In this paper, we present an approach that analyzes co-occurrences of entities across articles of different news outlets to indicate a strong but difficult to detect form of bias: bias by omission or commission. Therefore, we run analyses on the coverage of nine major US news outlets over one year. We set a low performing but transparent baseline, which indicates a news outlet’s affiliation towards a political slant group based on co-occurring entities.
Citation: J. Ehrhardt, T. Spinde, A. Vardasbi, and F. Hamborg, “Omission of Information: Identifying Political Slant via an Analysis of Co-occurring Entities,” Universität Regensburg, 2021. doi: 10.5283/EPUB.44939.