Media bias occurs when journalists and news producers show bias in how they report and cover news. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening of the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.
In journalism and mass media, sensationalism is a type of editorial tactic. Events and topics in news stories are selected and worded to excite the greatest number of readers and viewers. This style of news reporting encourages biased or emotionally loaded impressions of events rather than neutrality, and may cause a manipulation to the truth of a story. Sensationalism may rely on reports about generally insignificant matters and portray them as a major influence on society, or biased presentations of newsworthy topics, in a trivial, or tabloid manner, contrary to general assumptions of professional journalistic standards.
The Australian Financial Review (AFR) is an Australian business-focused, compact daily newspaper covering the current business and economic affairs of Australia and the world. The newspaper is based in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia; owned by Nine Entertainment and has been published continuously since its founding in 1951. The AFR, along with the rest of Fairfax Media, was sold to Nine Entertainment for more than A$2.3 billion. The AFR is published in tabloid format six times a week, whilst providing 24/7 online coverage through its website. In November 2019, the AFR reached 2.647 million Australians through both print and digital mediums (Mumbrella).
Journalistic ethics and standards comprise principles of ethics and good practice applicable to journalists. This subset of media ethics is known as journalism's professional "code of ethics" and the "canons of journalism". The basic codes and canons commonly appear in statements by professional journalism associations and individual print, broadcast, and online news organizations.
Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. Misinformation can exist without specific malicious intent; disinformation is distinct in that it is deliberately deceptive and propagated. Misinformation can include inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, or false information as well as selective or half-truths.
Claims of media bias generally focus on the idea of media outlets reporting news in a way that seems partisan. Other claims argue that outlets sometimes sacrifice objectivity in pursuit of growth or profits.
The Croatian Wikipedia is the Croatian language version of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, started on February 16, 2003. This version has 220,680 articles and a total of 6.93 million edits have been made. It has 313,729 registered users, out of which 523 have been active in the last 30 days, and 13 administrators. Throughout 2014, fewer than two dozen editors made more than 100 edits a month; around 150 made more than 5 edits a month. Around 750 articles are ranked as featured.
The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001. Most of the criticism has been directed toward its content, community of established volunteer users, process, and rules. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias. Concerns have also been raised about systemic bias along gender, racial, political, corporate, institutional, and national lines. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Further concerns include the vandalism and partisanship facilitated by anonymous editing, clique behavior, social stratification between a guardian class and newer users, excessive rule-making, edit warring, and uneven policy application.
The reliability of Wikipedia and its user-generated editing model, particularly its English-language edition, has been questioned and tested. Wikipedia is written and edited by volunteer editors, who generate online content with the editorial oversight of other volunteer editors via community-generated policies and guidelines. The reliability of the project has been tested statistically through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in its editing process. The online encyclopedia has been criticized for its factual unreliability, principally regarding its content, presentation, and editorial processes. Studies and surveys attempting to gauge the reliability of Wikipedia have mixed results. Wikipedia's reliability was frequently criticized in the 2000s but has been improved; it has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
Political journalism is a broad branch of journalism that includes coverage of all aspects of politics and political science, although the term usually refers specifically to coverage of civil governments and political power.
In news media and social media, an echo chamber is an environment or ecosystem in which participants encounter beliefs that amplify or reinforce their preexisting beliefs by communication and repetition inside a closed system and insulated from rebuttal. An echo chamber circulates existing views without encountering opposing views, potentially resulting in confirmation bias. Echo chambers may increase social and political polarization and extremism. On social media, it is thought that echo chambers limit exposure to diverse perspectives, and favor and reinforce presupposed narratives and ideologies.
A filter bubble or ideological frame is a state of intellectual isolation that can result from personalized searches, recommendation systems, and algorithmic curation. The search results are based on information about the user, such as their location, past click-behavior, and search history. Consequently, users become separated from information that disagrees with their viewpoints, effectively isolating them in their own cultural or ideological bubbles, resulting in a limited and customized view of the world. The choices made by these algorithms are only sometimes transparent. Prime examples include Google Personalized Search results and Facebook's personalized news-stream.
Media Cloud is an open-source content analysis tool that aims to map news media coverage of current events. It "performs five basic functions -- media definition, crawling, text extraction, word vectoring, and analysis." Media cloud "tracks hundreds of newspapers and thousands of Web sites and blogs, and archives the information in a searchable form. The database ... enable[s] researchers to search for key people, places and events — from Michael Jackson to the Iranian elections — and find out precisely when, where and how frequently they are covered." Media Cloud was developed by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and launched in March 2009. It's distributed under the GNU GPL 3+.
The English Wikipedia has been criticized for having a systemic racial bias in its coverage. This bias partially stems from an under-representation of people of color within its volunteer editor base. In "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," it is noted that article completeness and coverage is dependent on the interests of Wikipedians, not necessarily on the subject matter itself. The past president of Wikimedia D.C., James Hare, asserted that "a lot of [Black American history] is left out" of Wikipedia, due to articles predominately being written by white editors. Articles about African topics that do exist are, according to some, largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus, they only reflect their knowledge and their consumption of media, which "tend to perpetuate a negative image" of Africa. Maira Liriano of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has argued that the lack of information regarding Black history on Wikipedia "makes it seem like it's not important."
The social influence bias is an asymmetric herding effect on online social media platforms which makes users overcompensate for negative ratings but amplify positive ones. Positive social influence can accumulate and result in a rating bubble, while negative social influence is neutralized by crowd correction. This phenomenon was first described in a paper written by Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral and Sean J. Taylor in 2014, then the question was revisited by Cicognani et al., whose experiment reinforced Munchnik's and his co-authors' results.
Ideological bias on Wikipedia, especially in its English-language edition, has been the subject of academic analysis and public criticism of the project. Questions relate to whether its content is biased due to the political, religious, or other ideologies its volunteer editors may adhere to. These all draw concerns as to the possible effects this may have on the encyclopedia's reliability.
Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) is an American website founded in 2015 by Dave M. Van Zandt. It considers four main categories and multiple subcategories in assessing the "political bias" and "factual reporting" of media outlets.
Social media as a news source is the use of online social media platforms rather than moreover traditional media platforms to obtain news. Just as television turned a nation of people who listened to media content into watchers of media content in the 1950s to the 1980s, the emergence of social media has created a nation of media content creators. Almost half of Americans use social media as a news source, according to the Pew Research Center.
Political bias is a bias or perceived bias involving the slanting or altering of information to make a political position or political candidate seem more attractive. With a distinct association with media bias, it commonly refers to how a reporter, news organisation, or TV show covers a political candidate or a policy issue.
Ad Fontes Media, Inc. is a Colorado-based, media watchdog, public benefit corporation primarily known for its Media Bias Chart, which rates media sources in terms of political bias and reliability. The organization was founded in 2018 by patent attorney Vanessa Otero with the goal of combating political polarization and media bias. Ad Fontes Media uses a panel of analysts across the political spectrum to evaluate articles for the Chart.
