AI for Media Fairness: Detecting Bias in English News

Abstract

The digital journalism growth has enabled many more people to have access to a larger amount of information and news; however, this increased access to the internet and news has also brought attention to an increasing number of additional concerns regarding the influence of bias on how news media report, produce and share their content [1]. In this thesis, we explore and research multiple forms of bias found within English language based media and offer an AI-powered solution to identifying and classifying bias within the English language media [2]. The focus of our research is the major forms of media bias – i.e., (i) language bias; (ii) selection bias; (iii) framing bias; (iv) sentiment bias; and (v) ideological bias. The main data source used in this research is a publically available data corpus known as the Media Bias Identification Corpus (MBIC) which consists of labeled media articles written in the English language. We then utilize Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to preprocess the text and to obtain features, and subsequently apply several different types of machine learning and deep learning models to classify media biased content [3]. We thoroughly evaluate the performance of all of the trained models using standard performance metrics in order to compare their classification performance, as well as to apply topic modeling to evaluate how media topics are associated with particular forms of bias. Our evaluation of the experimental results found that framing bias and sentiment-based forms of bias were the two most prevalent forms of bias found within media articles written in English. Finally, the machine learning, and more specifically the deep learning and transformer based, models outperformed models for the purpose of detecting media bias in English written articles. The results of our research will aid in developing a fair and transparent approach to digital journalism for media organizations, by providing insight into how the ty