Media Bias - Tools For Measuring and Evaluating Media Bias

Tools For Measuring and Evaluating Media Bias

Richard Alan Nelson's (2004) study cited above on Tracking Propaganda to the Source: Tools for Analyzing Media Bias reports there are at least 12 methods used to analyze the existence of and quantify bias:

  1. Surveys of the political/cultural attitudes of journalists, particularly members of the media elite, and of journalism students.
  2. Studies of journalists' previous professional connections.
  3. Collections of quotations in which prominent journalists reveal their beliefs about politics and/or the proper role of their profession.
  4. Computer word-use and topic analysis searches to determine content and labeling.
  5. Studies of policies recommended in news stories.
  6. Comparisons of the agenda of the news and entertainment media with agendas of political candidates or other activists.
  7. Positive/negative coverage analysis.
  8. Reviews of the personal demographics of media decision makers.
  9. Comparisons of advertising sources/content which influence information/entertainment content.
  10. Analyses of the extent of government propaganda and public relations (PR) industry impact on media.
  11. Studies of the use of experts and spokespersons etc. by media vs. those not selected to determine the interest groups and ideologies represented vs. those excluded.
  12. Research into payments of journalists by corporations and trade associations to speak before their groups and the impact that may have on coverage.

Read more about this topic:  Media Bias

Famous quotes containing the words tools for, tools, measuring, evaluating, media and/or bias:

    There is a great satisfaction in building good tools for other people to use.
    Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)

    Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.
    Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

    ... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creators! Evaluating is itself the most valuable treasure of all that we value. It is only through evaluation that value exists: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creators!
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.
    Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)

    The solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)