Cross-National Patterns in Political Bias in European News Media
Gabor Toka (Department of Political Science, Central European
University) tokag@ceu.hu
Marina Popescu (Department of Government, University of Essex)
mpope@essex.ac.uk
Normative theories of the role of news media in a democracy emphasize
the need for the diversity and balance of political viewpoints that are
expressed in news media. Positive theories of media, however, stress
several possible sources of systematic political bias in media that can
lead to the overrepresentation of (a) pro-business; (b)
pro-governmental; (c) socially liberal; (d) centrist; (e) pro-EU; or (f)
anti-immigrant and tough-on-crime views in the media. Our paper proposes
new measures and introduces new data in the comparative empirical
investigation of political bias in news media, provides descriptive
information for most European societies about the presence, intensity
and direction of bias in the news media as a whole as well as in 289
individual media outlets. We test whether there are cross-nationally
prevalent patterns in the direction of bias, whether public service and
commercial media differ in the direction of the typical bias, and what
kind of media systems are more likely to produce politically polarized
media outlets.
