Mainstream American News Media: Is It as Polarized as Its Consumers Over the Issues of Climate Change, COVID, and Immigration? A Cross-Country Study of U.S. and U.K. News Media
Date
2022-05
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Does U.S. news media really just cater to the existing partisan divide? Studies
show that American society has grown more polarized on a partisan basis, yet in the
United Kingdom, party loyalty is splintering and growing weak. If news media is truly
just a business, we can expect U.S. news coverage to be more ideologically polarized
than that of the U.K. The role of the media as a political influence has been the subject
of much scholarship, but there lacks a database in which multiple content-related
variables can be compared across countries. The objective of this study is to compare
the media landscapes of the U.S. and the U.K. over shared political issues: climate
change, COVID vaccines, and immigration. To do so, a collection of 600 articles
across multiple news outlets in both the United States and the United Kingdom were
quantified based on ideological leaning, key source, and article type. It was found that
U.S. news articles are only slightly more likely to be ideological, and after controlling
for the greater number of opinion articles in the U.S., there is no difference in the
levels of ideology between the two countries’ media. This means that 1) the ideology
of U.S. news coverage is not as dramatic as a business model would expect, and 2) if
the U.S. news media is more ideological than that of the U.K., it is due to a greater
number of opinion articles rather than innate outlet bias
Description
Keywords
News media, Media landscapes, Ideological polarity, News