Identifying Media Bias by Analyzing Reported Speech

Media analysis can reveal interesting patterns in the way newspapers report the news and how these patterns evolve over time. One example pattern is the quoting choices that media make, which could be used as bias indicators. Media slant can be expressed both with the choice of reporting an event, e.g. a person's statement, but also with the words used to describe the event. Thus, automatic discovery of systematic quoting patterns in the news could illustrate to the readers the media' beliefs, such as political preferences. In this paper, we aim to discover political media bias by demonstrating systematic patterns of reporting speech in two major British newspapers. To this end, we analyze news articles from 2000 to 2015. By taking into account different kinds of bias, such as selection, coverage and framing bias, we show that the quoting patterns of newspapers are predictable.