POL369Y5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Selection Bias, National Post, Toronto Star
Partisan bias: The news is biased towards a party.
Selection bias: taking certain events over others. Distortion in reality. Political stories vs.
newsworthy stories.
presentation bias: framing. The story is presented in a way that distorts reality.
Unobserved population (challenge with selection bas): in order to understand whether a
newspaper has selection bias we have to overcome the unobserved population problem. This
problem exists because researchers have unobserved stories that need to be taken into
consideration. For example: only 3 out of 100 stories got published. So we have to look at the
unobserved stories aka the 97 stories. For us to claim bias, we have to have a way to access those
stories. Major tool is large “n – sample” comparison.
Subjectivity (presentation bias): many people who are studying it see the news as bias anyway.
We might see presentation bias where it may not exist. We need methodically to get the
subjectivity out of the way. Need hypothetical exemplar of what they’re looking for. Take reality
and compare it to the hypothetical example.
1. Think about how the media is presented to you.
2. In order for bias to be of value to us, it has to be beyond just favorable articles or lazy
journalism.
3. Not saying that bias doesn’t exist; we just don’t know when it is or not. It’s hard for us to
find out.
4. Allegations of partisan bias are only meaningful in media systems that have been
organized around internal diversity of opinion. Ones around external diversity of opinion
are meaningless (Partisan reading – two polls)
Internal diversity of opinion
Globe and mail, National Post, CBC, Toronto Star.
^All of them are expected to provide us with all sides of the story. Each is expected to do the
same thing.
External means news organizations take different positions in political disputes, such as the
Nordic countries: one is green, one is conservative etc.
European is more external but they are more informed and vote more. Fox is very right and
republican whereas CNN is more democratic. The problem with fox isn’t that they are taking on
partisan sides but that they concentrate more on entertainment rather than engage with the
information.
Influences on News
1. Individual: journalist as a person. They are training their individual attitudes on how to
angle their stories. Trained to be story tellers (eyes on the page). Individual journalists
will come up with different angles on how to tell a story and this has an impact on news
content. Their role perception is important (do they see themselves as a watchdog or a
mirror of news stories).
2. Routines: structured pattern of work. Journalists have different beats →particular
reporters have different roles in the news organization. The routine is to build sources.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Partisan bias: the news is biased towards a party. Political stories vs. newsworthy stories. presentation bias: framing. The story is presented in a way that distorts reality. Unobserved population (challenge with selection bas): in order to understand whether a newspaper has selection bias we have to overcome the unobserved population problem. This problem exists because researchers have unobserved stories that need to be taken into consideration. For example: only 3 out of 100 stories got published. So we have to look at the unobserved stories aka the 97 stories. For us to claim bias, we have to have a way to access those stories. Major tool is large n sample comparison. Subjectivity (presentation bias): many people who are studying it see the news as bias anyway. We might see presentation bias where it may not exist. We need methodically to get the subjectivity out of the way. Need hypothetical exemplar of what they"re looking for.
