Is There a Political Bias? A Computational Analysis of Female Subjects' Coverage in Liberal and Conservative Newspapers

Abstract

Objectives. One possible source for the gap in media coverage between female and male subjects is the political affiliation of the media source. The objective of this present study was to test whether there is a difference between more liberal and more conservative newspapers in coverage rates of female subjects. Methods. We used computational methods to analyze a unique large-scale data set (complied by the Lydia Text Analysis System) and compared the 2010 female coverage rates in 168 newspapers. Results. Contrary to our expectations, we found that conservative media tend to cover female subjects no less (and even slightly more) than liberal media. However, the difference was no longer significant once we controlled for newspaper distribution. Conclusion. The common view that liberal newspapers are more likely to cover female subjects was not supported by this study. Both conservative and liberal newspapers are much more likely to cover males.Over the last few decades, women's representation in the media has been examined by a myriad of studies. Alongside evidence for stereotypical and often sexualized and demeaning depictions (e.g., Fiske, 1996;Lester and Dente Ross, 2003;Tuchman, 1979;Van Zoonen, 1988), studies have also suggested that women are substantially underrepresented in the media in general and in the written press specifically (e.g., Davis, 1982;Duncan, Messner, and Williams, 1991;Greenwald, 1990;Potter, 1985;Zoch and Turk, 1998). Many have suggested that such "symbolic annihilation" (Tuchman, 1978) poses a serious problem for the way news media report on daily life and plays a significant role

Women Are Seen More than Heard in Online Newspapers

“…Our findings here are supported by manual studies [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ], and earlier automated studies [ 8 , 9 , 10 ], including our own work [ 11 ] where we previously found that the ratio of males to females of the most mentioned entities found that Sports was contained the least balanced among the 1,000 most mentioned entities, with the topic of Fashion being the closest to parity.…”

“…These findings confirm those of smaller-scale studies performed using traditional analytical techniques, such as that undertaken by Desmond and Danilewicz [ 32 ] who examined 580 televised news stories, finding that female reporters were more likely to present human interest and health related stories, and that males were significantly more often used as experts than their female counterparts. Similar results have been reported for printed news media [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ], with men writing the majority of the news and are most often quoted or mentioned within the news stories. Other large-scale studies using data-driven approaches, such as that undertaken by Wagner et al [ 33 ], have shown that gender imbalance is also an issue on the web, finding in a selection of 124,824 articles from Wikipedia that while women were featured equally as often as men, the representation of those women was very different from men, often focussing on romantic and family-related issues.…”

“…Critical investigation of news output can now be undertaken, including both text and images, on a vast scale using modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. Our study is one of only a few using systematic large scale data collection focusing on issues around gender representation in the news [ 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ]. The use of a large number of articles, obtained from hundreds of different outlets, allows this study to be less dependent on the specific choice of outlets, and also gives us sufficient statistical power to analyse the link between gender ratio (the ratio between males and females represented in an article) and certain topics, including entertainment, fashion, religion, business and politics.…”

Political Leaning and Coverage Sentiment: Are Conservative Newspapers More Negative Toward Women?*

“…Political leanings may affect both who is being covered and how they are portrayed. Former research suggests that media political slant is not clearly associated the amount of media attention devoted to women versus men (Adkins, Covert, and Wasburn, ; Potter, ; Shor et al., , ). However, it remains plausible that media political leaning is associated with the tone of coverage and its level of negativity.…”

The Role of Gender Stereotypes in Gubernatorial Campaign Coverage

“…Existing research on gender differences in campaign coverage of candidates is mixed in its findings. In their study of newspaper ideology and coverage of woman candidates, Shor et al 22 find that newspapers from across the ideological spectrum cover women candidates significantly less than men running for office. Contrasting these findings, Hayes and Lawless 8 find that women congressional candidates do not face media coverage that differs from that of their men counterparts.…”