# Sampling the News Producers: A Large News and Feature Data Set for the Study of the Complex Media Landscape

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.10124 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10124/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11896/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Predicting the Factuality and the Bias of News Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12506/) (2021)
- [KCD: Knowledge Walks and Textual Cues Enhanced Political Perspective Detection in News Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04046/) (2022)
- [Ev2R: Evaluating Evidence Retrieval in Automated Fact-Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05375/) (2024)
- [KGAP: Knowledge Graph Augmented Political Perspective Detection in News Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03861/) (2021)
- [Conflicts, Villains, Resolutions: Towards models of Narrative Media Framing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02052/) (2023)
- [The Spread of Propaganda by Coordinated Communities on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13046/) (2021)
- [Credible, Unreliable or Leaked?: Evidence Verification for Enhanced Automated Fact-checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18971/) (2024)
- [Assessing the Effectiveness of GPT-3 in Detecting False Political Statements: A Case Study on the LIAR Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08190/) (2023)
- [NELA-GT-2022: A Large Multi-Labelled News Dataset for The Study of Misinformation in News Articles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05659/) (2022)
- [Hidden Biases in Unreliable News Detection Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10130/) (2021)
- [PAR: Political Actor Representation Learning with Social Context and Expert Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08362/) (2022)
- [Discourse Structures Guided Fine-grained Propaganda Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18544/) (2023)
- [ViWikiFC: Fact-Checking for Vietnamese Wikipedia-Based Textual Knowledge Source](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07615/) (2024)
- [Legislator Representation Learning with Social Context and Expert Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03881/) (2021)
- [Experiments in News Bias Detection with Pre-Trained Neural Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09938/) (2024)
- [Yesterday's News: Benchmarking Multi-Dimensional Out-of-Distribution Generalization of Misinformation Detection Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18122/) (2024)
- [Evons: A Dataset for Fake and Real News Virality Analysis and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08129/) (2022)
- [Towards Corpus-Scale Discovery of Selection Biases in News Coverage: Comparing What Sources Say About Entities as a Start](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03414/) (2023)
- [BiasScanner: Automatic Detection and Classification of News Bias to Strengthen Democracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10829/) (2024)
- [Reasoning for Propaganda Detection via Label-Guided CoT Optimisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17271/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The complexity and diversity of today's media landscape provides many challenges for researchers studying news producers. These producers use many different strategies to get their message believed by readers through the writing styles they employ, by repetition across different media sources with or without attribution, as well as other mechanisms that are yet to be studied deeply. To better facilitate systematic studies in this area, we present a large political news data set, containing over 136K news articles, from 92 news sources, collected over 7 months of 2017. These news sources are carefully chosen to include well-established and mainstream sources, maliciously fake sources, satire sources, and hyper-partisan political blogs. In addition to each article we compute 130 content-based and social media engagement features drawn from a wide range of literature on political bias, persuasion, and misinformation. With the release of the data set, we also provide the source code for feature computation. In this paper, we discuss the first release of the data set and demonstrate 4 use cases of the data and features: news characterization, engagement characterization, news attribution and content copying, and discovering news narratives.