Measuring Partisan Media Bias Cross‐Nationally

Partisan media bias has been difficult to operationalize, and it rarely has been analyzed cross‐nationally. This study presents new measures of media bias and applies them to data covering 24 EU countries. To build the measures, we employ two benchmarks of political balance—objectivity and neutrality. We rely on cross‐national content data on parties' visibility from 13'893 mentions in news stories, 530 expert evaluations on party favorability of media outlets, and survey data on media audiences' partisan preferences from 24'068 individuals. Scores are used to assess partisan media bias at country, outlet, and party levels.