Enabling News Consumers to View and Understand Biased News Coverage: A Study on the Perception and Visualization of Media Bias

TL;DR

This study investigates how different visualization strategies affect news consumers' perception of media bias, finding that certain visualizations can communicate bias more effectively, though overall effects are limited.

Contribution

It systematically analyzes visualization methods for media bias, providing insights into their effectiveness in enhancing bias perception among news consumers.

Findings

Bias visualization improves awareness of bias instances.

Overview pages with opposing viewpoints do not significantly change bias perception.

Perceived journalist bias correlates with perceived political extremeness.

Abstract

Traditional media outlets are known to report political news in a biased way, potentially affecting the political beliefs of the audience and even altering their voting behaviors. Many researchers focus on automatically detecting and identifying media bias in the news, but only very few studies exist that systematically analyze how theses biases can be best visualized and communicated. We create three manually annotated datasets and test varying visualization strategies. The results show no strong effects of becoming aware of the bias of the treatment groups compared to the control group, although a visualization of hand-annotated bias communicated bias instances more effectively than a framing visualization. Showing participants an overview page, which opposes different viewpoints on the same topic, does not yield differences in respondents' bias perception. Using a multilevel model, we find that perceived journalist bias is significantly related to perceived political extremeness and impartiality of the article.