Media Bias in German Online Newspapers

Online newspapers have been established as a crucial information source, at least partially replacing traditional media like television or print media. As all other media, online newspapers are potentially affected by media bias.This describes non-neutral reporting of journalists and other news producers, e.g. with respect to specific opinions or political parties. Analysis of media bias has a long tradition in political science. However, traditional techniques rely heavily on manual annotation and are thus often limited to the analysis of small sets of articles. In this paper, we investigate a dataset that covers all political and economical news from four leading German online newspapers over a timespan of four years. In order to analyze this large document set and compare the political orientation of different newspapers, we propose a variety of automatically computable measures that can indicate media bias. As a result, statistically significant differences in the reporting about specific parties can be detected between the analyzed online newspapers.