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

Eran Shor, Arnout Rijt, Charles Ward, Saoussan Askar and Steven Skiena

Social Science Quarterly, 2014, vol. 95, issue 5, 1213-1229

Abstract: type="main">

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.

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.

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.

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.

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ssqu.12091 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:socsci:v:95:y:2014:i:5:p:1213-1229

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0038-4941

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science Quarterly is currently edited by Robert L. Lineberry

More articles in Social Science Quarterly from Southwestern Social Science Association
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().