The Table of Media Bias Elements: A sentence-level taxonomy of media bias types and propaganda techniques

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Menzner, Tim, Leidner, Jochen L.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912810722656256
author Menzner, Tim
Leidner, Jochen L.
author_facet Menzner, Tim
Leidner, Jochen L.
contents Public debates about "left-" or "right-wing" news overlook the fact that bias is usually conveyed by concrete linguistic manoeuvres that transcend any single political spectrum. We therefore shift the focus from where an outlet allegedly stands to how partiality is expressed in individual sentences. Drawing on 26,464 sentences collected from newsroom corpora, user submissions and our own browsing, we iteratively combine close-reading, interdisciplinary theory and pilot annotation to derive a fine-grained, sentence-level taxonomy of media bias and propaganda. The result is a two-tier schema comprising 38 elementary bias types, arranged in six functional families and visualised as a "table of media-bias elements". For each type we supply a definition, real-world examples, cognitive and societal drivers, and guidance for recognition. A quantitative survey of a random 155-sentence sample illustrates prevalence differences, while a cross-walk to the best-known NLP and communication-science taxonomies reveals substantial coverage gains and reduced ambiguity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_05358
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Table of Media Bias Elements: A sentence-level taxonomy of media bias types and propaganda techniques
Menzner, Tim
Leidner, Jochen L.
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
I.2.7; I.5; H.3.3; I.7; J.4
Public debates about "left-" or "right-wing" news overlook the fact that bias is usually conveyed by concrete linguistic manoeuvres that transcend any single political spectrum. We therefore shift the focus from where an outlet allegedly stands to how partiality is expressed in individual sentences. Drawing on 26,464 sentences collected from newsroom corpora, user submissions and our own browsing, we iteratively combine close-reading, interdisciplinary theory and pilot annotation to derive a fine-grained, sentence-level taxonomy of media bias and propaganda. The result is a two-tier schema comprising 38 elementary bias types, arranged in six functional families and visualised as a "table of media-bias elements". For each type we supply a definition, real-world examples, cognitive and societal drivers, and guidance for recognition. A quantitative survey of a random 155-sentence sample illustrates prevalence differences, while a cross-walk to the best-known NLP and communication-science taxonomies reveals substantial coverage gains and reduced ambiguity.
title The Table of Media Bias Elements: A sentence-level taxonomy of media bias types and propaganda techniques
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
I.2.7; I.5; H.3.3; I.7; J.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.05358