All Things Considered: Detecting Partisan Events from News Media with Cross-Article Comparison

Yujian Liu, Xinliang Zhang, Kaijian Zou, Ruihong Huang, Nicholas Beauchamp, Lu Wang


Abstract
Public opinion is shaped by the information news media provide, and that information in turn may be shaped by the ideological preferences of media outlets. But while much attention has been devoted to media bias via overt ideological language or topic selection, a more unobtrusive way in which the media shape opinion is via the strategic inclusion or omission of partisan events that may support one side or the other. We develop a latent variable-based framework to predict the ideology of news articles by comparing multiple articles on the same story and identifying partisan events whose inclusion or omission reveals ideology. Our experiments first validate the existence of partisan event selection, and then show that article alignment and cross-document comparison detect partisan events and article ideology better than competitive baselines. Our results reveal the high-level form of media bias, which is present even among mainstream media with strong norms of objectivity and nonpartisanship. Our codebase and dataset are available at https://github.com/launchnlp/ATC.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.957
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15472–15488
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.957
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.957
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yujian Liu, Xinliang Zhang, Kaijian Zou, Ruihong Huang, Nicholas Beauchamp, and Lu Wang. 2023. All Things Considered: Detecting Partisan Events from News Media with Cross-Article Comparison. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15472–15488, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
All Things Considered: Detecting Partisan Events from News Media with Cross-Article Comparison (Liu et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.957.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.957.mp4