# Bias or Diversity? Unraveling Fine-Grained Thematic Discrepancy in U.S. News Headlines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15708 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15708/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Large Pre-trained Language Models Contain Human-like Biases of What is Right and Wrong to Do](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11790/) (2021)
- [Do You Think It's Biased? How To Ask For The Perception Of Media Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07392/) (2021)
- [Understanding Political Polarization via Jointly Modeling Users, Connections and Multimodal Contents on Heterogeneous Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05946/) (2022)
- [Selection Bias in News Coverage: Learning it, Fighting it](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07536/) (2019)
- [Computational Assessment of Hyperpartisanship in News Titles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06270/) (2023)
- [Not All Asians are the Same: A Disaggregated Approach to Identifying Anti-Asian Racism in Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11640/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [GPT-4V(ision) as A Social Media Analysis Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07547/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There is a broad consensus that news media outlets incorporate ideological biases in their news articles. However, prior studies on measuring the discrepancies among media outlets and further dissecting the origins of thematic differences suffer from small sample sizes and limited scope and granularity. In this study, we use a large dataset of 1.8 million news headlines from major U.S. media outlets spanning from 2014 to 2022 to thoroughly track and dissect the fine-grained thematic discrepancy in U.S. news media. We employ multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to quantify the fine-grained thematic discrepancy related to four prominent topics - domestic politics, economic issues, social issues, and foreign affairs in order to derive a more holistic analysis. Additionally, we compare the most frequent n-grams in media headlines to provide further qualitative insights into our analysis. Our findings indicate that on domestic politics and social issues, the discrepancy can be attributed to a certain degree of media bias. Meanwhile, the discrepancy in reporting foreign affairs is largely attributed to the diversity in individual journalistic styles. Finally, U.S. media outlets show consistency and high similarity in their coverage of economic issues.