What is up with the News These Days?

 When I created this blog, I chose my theme based on a few different factors. One of them was the pure curiosity to learn about how bias affects our intake of current news. Another reason was to figure out where different sources are settled on the scale of extreme leftist to extreme rightist. Something I did not expect to learn was how not all media get reported on by every source.

It may just be young naivety, but I had always assumed that when something happens in media that could be considered "newsworthy" it would immediately be seen by every source. This is not the case as it turns out. What I have seen is stories being highly publicized in some sources and simply never mentioned in others. This makes my job here more difficult as my goal is to find two sources on the same topic and discuss their bias. That is hard to do when half of the major news is never reported on.

A pattern can be found if you snoop enough. When information comes out on a rightist news source highlighting something negative of someone or something from the left, it is not reported on the left's side. The same can be said in reverse. 

I am providing links to two news sources so you can see what I am talking about.

Buzzfeed: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/section/politics

Fox News: https://www.foxnews.com/

I wondered, how can we understand these patterns better? I found an article that may have some answers. 

It boils down to this; news sourcing are targeting certain types of people. They do this by selecting stories that fall into the wants of their majority viewers. Factors that decide who target audience include geography, political characteristics and profit- maximization.

"In this paper, we try to find whether or not an outlet’s coverage deviates from the purely geographic influence to a more sophisticated behavior involving the weight of political and socioeconomic interests for example, as operationalized by Prat and Strömberg. " (Elejalde, Ferres, Schifanella, 2019).

This article goes into the dynamics, coverage, bias, socioeconomic factors and geographic factors that all relate to online news in today's world. 

The conclusion of this article brought me a lot of clarity on the inner works of online media. It also begins the answer the complex question, how did news get so biased? 

"Using data from multiple sources we found that news outlets systematically prefer followers from densely populated areas with a specific socioeconomic profile. The political leaning of the commune proved to be the most discriminating feature on the prediction of the level of readership ratings. These findings support the theoretical claim that describes the news media outlets as profit-driven companies."(Elejalde, Ferres, Schifanella, 2019).

Through research and interviews, the authors of Understanding News Outlets' Audience-targeting Patterns offers very useful information as well as poses new questions on how to operate the online world on media bias better.

References

Elejalde, Erick, et al. “Understanding News Outlets' Audience-Targeting Patterns - EPJ Data Science.” SpringerOpen, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 14 May 2019, https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0194-8.

“BuzzFeed News Politics.” BuzzFeed News, BuzzFeed News, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/section/politics.

Fox News, FOX News Network, https://www.foxnews.com/.