[niknik]

@pravdaru 3-17-15

A sweeping study of some 130,213 news articles on the 2012 presidential election between President Obama and Mitt Romney has proven anew that there was a strong pro-Democratic bias in the U.S. and international press.

The study, published in the authoritative journal*

"The 2012 elections saw an 'issue trespassing' strategy with President Obama taking the initiative on the economy," found the survey of stories produced by 719 U.S. and international outlets.


The survey used a technical language processing analysis to filter all the stories, and found that Obama was portrayed as an attack dog and Romney on defense. Key was Obama's ability to "own" the economic message despite Romney's repeated assaults and the public's general view that the GOP handles the economy better.

"Overall, media reporting contained more frequently positive statements about the Democrats than the Republicans. Overall, the Republicans were more frequently the object of negative statements," wrote the study authors, Their conclusion: "The Republican Party is the most divisive subject in the campaign, and is portrayed in a more negative fashion than the Democrats."

[niknik]

To those of us who pay attention, this isn't news. But either by choice or ignorance, many will swear it's not the case.

But the evidence says otherwise. The media elected Obama, especially for the second term. Never in the history of presidential politics has a president or candidate enjoyed so much affection and protection. As if many mainstream media outlets were working for Obama's campaign.

The country would be going a different direction if the main three networks were really independent. A better direction.

Not just because it would help Republicans. But it would help America, as well as the Democrat party. It would force the left to get rid of it's rotten eggs, because they would be exposed. People like Nancy Pelosi wouldn't become Speaker of the House.

[rob666]

...

[hal0mega]

Media Bias? Since when

[hal0mega]

Originally Posted by rob666 ↗

...

[Kanda444]

so....we do a quick search (since there is no source for this) and we find it here....at a conservative journalist site owned by conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz. the site, i might add, provides no link to the study (what a shocker...luckily, KandaPanda linked it for you )

so, we have a conservative media outlet claiming that the mainstream media is bias against conservatives and their proof is...well, one study that they quote but dont actual source for their readers (best to just trust what they say instead of actually researching it for ourselves, eh? ). The study, while peer reviewed, is in a journal who says it's "key purpose is to provide a space for connecting debates about the emerging field of Big Data practices and how they are reconfiguring academic, social, industry, business and government relations, expertise, methods, concepts and knowledge."

Big Data and Society Journal is a peer reviewed site, so at least we can trust them...now, on to what the study also had to say: about the methodology used in this study, the study says "Analysing the media coverage of the US election using our Big Data approach revealed the strategic positioning of actors around issues in the ‘mediascape’ of online English language news. We used a semantic graph obtained by parsing the text, identifying the noun phrases and the verbs and linking them and used SVO triplets as building blocks for a network. This approach is innovative and has never been applied to a real-world dataset of this scale. " It also concluded, as the article said, "Results suggest that the 2012 campaign was characterised by Obama’s strategy of defending his record on the economic policy and ‘owning the issue’, by his being ‘on the attack’ about a number of issues and forcing Romney and the Republicans to be defensive about salient issues. The set of triplets show that the 2012 campaign was very much focused on the issues of the US economy and civil rights for the Democrats. The agenda-setting effort was directed towards these two areas. Obama challenged the traditional Republican issue ownership about the economy. Other major actors who played an important role for Obama and Romney were Bill Clinton and Paul Ryan. Overall, media reporting contained more frequently positive statements about the Democrats than the Republicans. Overall, the Republicans were more frequently the object of negative statements either by Democrats or other actors. The Republican Party (GOP) is the most divisive subject in the campaign, and is portrayed in a more negative fashion than the Democrats."

in other words, to republicans:



....

[Kanda444]

as for media bias.... the study says it's a slight one:

From Figure 8, a number of interesting questions can be answered. For example, was the media reportage of the 2012 electoral campaign biased towards one of the two parties? The overall positive objects ratio plot in Figure 8 provides the answer, albeit within the limitations of the methodology applied in this study. This quantity reflects the number of times an actor has been the object in a SVO triplet with a positive verb. The two objects ‘Democrats’ and ‘Republicans’ are present in different quadrants: the ‘Democrats’ are reported as being (slightly) more often the object of positive statements or actions, while the Republicans are more often the object of negative statements or actions.

that is the only time the word 'bias' is used in any form in the study. it then goes on to say:

From Figure 8, we also learn that both vice-president candidates, Biden and Ryan, had mildly negative reporting. Above all, the chart confirms the extreme importance played by the status of the US economy as the main issue towards which the campaign gravitated. ‘Economy’, ‘Money’, ‘Jobs’ and ‘Taxes’ are the main focus of the reporting and also of both candidates.

the study is very clear about why these results were like this:

Results suggest that the 2012 campaign was characterised by Obama’s strategy of defending his record on the economic policy and ‘owning the issue’, by his being ‘on the attack’ about a number of issues and forcing Romney and the Republicans to be defensive about salient issues.

now, why would republicans feel defensive about salient issues?

The set of triplets show that the 2012 campaign was very much focused on the issues of the US economy and civil rights for the Democrats. The agenda-setting effort was directed towards these two areas. Obama challenged the traditional Republican issue ownership about the economy.

[Oswald2001]

The overwhelming majority of the media is fully of clueless Occutard LIBERAL types?

I never suspected. (rolls eyes)

Who could have possibly known? (sarcasm)

[Kanda444]

what is most shocking is when people seem to honestly trust the US media (any of it) at all. i mean, ffs, we have news stations like fox and msnbc that are openly politically bias. so when you have conservative stations and liberal stations, you're going to have a bias leaning one way or the other, inevitably.

in other words, if this is really news to anybody.....well then....phhht.

[TheVrist]

I think anyone with half a brain can tell which way a news outlets leans. Which makes them leaning an none existstant issue, imo. To me, the danger in hidden political influences stems from Hollywood productions.