The Media Bias Detector: A Framework for Annotating and Analyzing the News at Scale

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Haider, Samar, Tohidi, Amir, Wang, Jenny S., Dörr, Timothy, Rothschild, David M., Callison-Burch, Chris, Watts, Duncan J.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Haider, Samar
Tohidi, Amir
Wang, Jenny S.
Dörr, Timothy
Rothschild, David M.
Callison-Burch, Chris
Watts, Duncan J.
author_facet Haider, Samar
Tohidi, Amir
Wang, Jenny S.
Dörr, Timothy
Rothschild, David M.
Callison-Burch, Chris
Watts, Duncan J.
contents Mainstream news organizations shape public perception not only directly through the articles they publish but also through the choices they make about which topics to cover (or ignore) and how to frame the issues they do decide to cover. However, measuring these subtle forms of media bias at scale remains a challenge. Here, we introduce a large, ongoing (from January 1, 2024 to present), near real-time dataset and computational framework developed to enable systematic study of selection and framing bias in news coverage. Our pipeline integrates large language models (LLMs) with scalable, near-real-time news scraping to extract structured annotations -- including political lean, tone, topics, article type, and major events -- across hundreds of articles per day. We quantify these dimensions of coverage at multiple levels -- the sentence level, the article level, and the publisher level -- expanding the ways in which researchers can analyze media bias in the modern news landscape. In addition to a curated dataset, we also release an interactive web platform for convenient exploration of these data. Together, these contributions establish a reusable methodology for studying media bias at scale, providing empirical resources for future research. Leveraging the breadth of the corpus over time and across publishers, we also present some examples (focused on the 150,000+ articles examined in 2024) that illustrate how this novel data set can reveal insightful patterns in news coverage and bias, supporting academic research and real-world efforts to improve media accountability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_25649
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Media Bias Detector: A Framework for Annotating and Analyzing the News at Scale
Haider, Samar
Tohidi, Amir
Wang, Jenny S.
Dörr, Timothy
Rothschild, David M.
Callison-Burch, Chris
Watts, Duncan J.
Computation and Language
Mainstream news organizations shape public perception not only directly through the articles they publish but also through the choices they make about which topics to cover (or ignore) and how to frame the issues they do decide to cover. However, measuring these subtle forms of media bias at scale remains a challenge. Here, we introduce a large, ongoing (from January 1, 2024 to present), near real-time dataset and computational framework developed to enable systematic study of selection and framing bias in news coverage. Our pipeline integrates large language models (LLMs) with scalable, near-real-time news scraping to extract structured annotations -- including political lean, tone, topics, article type, and major events -- across hundreds of articles per day. We quantify these dimensions of coverage at multiple levels -- the sentence level, the article level, and the publisher level -- expanding the ways in which researchers can analyze media bias in the modern news landscape. In addition to a curated dataset, we also release an interactive web platform for convenient exploration of these data. Together, these contributions establish a reusable methodology for studying media bias at scale, providing empirical resources for future research. Leveraging the breadth of the corpus over time and across publishers, we also present some examples (focused on the 150,000+ articles examined in 2024) that illustrate how this novel data set can reveal insightful patterns in news coverage and bias, supporting academic research and real-world efforts to improve media accountability.
title The Media Bias Detector: A Framework for Annotating and Analyzing the News at Scale
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25649