Crossing the Aisle: Unveiling Partisan and Counter-Partisan Events in News Reporting

Kaijian Zou, Xinliang Zhang, Winston Wu, Nicholas Beauchamp, Lu Wang


Abstract
News media is expected to uphold unbiased reporting. Yet they may still affect public opinion by selectively including or omitting events that support or contradict their ideological positions. Prior work in NLP has only studied media bias via linguistic style and word usage. In this paper, we study to which degree media balances news reporting and affects consumers through event inclusion or omission. We first introduce the task of detecting both partisan and counter-partisan events: events that support or oppose the author’s political ideology. To conduct our study, we annotate a high-quality dataset, PAC, containing 8,511 (counter-)partisan event annotations in 304 news articles from ideologically diverse media outlets. We benchmark PAC to highlight the challenges of this task. Our findings highlight both the ways in which the news subtly shapes opinion and the need for large language models that better understand events within a broader context. Our dataset can be found at https://github.com/launchnlp/Partisan-Event-Dataset.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.45
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
621–632
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.45
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.45
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kaijian Zou, Xinliang Zhang, Winston Wu, Nicholas Beauchamp, and Lu Wang. 2023. Crossing the Aisle: Unveiling Partisan and Counter-Partisan Events in News Reporting. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 621–632, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Crossing the Aisle: Unveiling Partisan and Counter-Partisan Events in News Reporting (Zou et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.45.pdf