NewsPol: Measuring and Comparing News Media Polarisation

  • NewsPol: Measuring and Comparing News Media Polarisation

The News Polarisation stream addresses one of the major domains of polarisation that have been identified by the Australian Laureate Fellowship “Determining the Drivers and Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate”. The other major domains are Audience Polarisation and Discourse Polarisation.

News shapes our perception of social reality. Therefore, news content is a crucial piece in understanding the problem of societal polarisation. News is not purely a representation of reality; the way stories are told in the news impacts our lived realities. For a variety of reasons, news reporting can be partisan; indeed, it can be a driver of societal, social, and political polarisation.

Within the News Polarisation research stream, we focus on defining, conceptualising, and measuring polarisation through the systematic analysis of news content. We study news polarisation across different issues (e.g., Voice to Parliament referendum, climate change, migration, abortion), countries (e.g., Australia, Germany, Canada, UK, US), timeframes, and digital platforms to understand its manifestations, driving mechanisms, and context factors. We are also interested in examining causal links between news content and public discourse (de-)polarisation.

Problem statements and goals:

  • Like polarisation overall, polarisation in news content is poorly defined. We need to define, conceptualise, and measure news media polarisation in order to assess whether contemporary news is able to represent and serve its intended publics.
  • Although polarisation has a negative connotation, it is not trivial to determine when media coverage is polarised to a destructive degree both in the context of specific issues and at the overall system level.
  • Polarisation in news reporting is mostly conceptualised as favouring the left or right. But we need to explore measures of news polarisation beyond the dominant left-right continuum. To achieve this, we are developing new mixed-methods approaches to assess levels of polarisation in news coverage by different media outlets on four dimensions: actors, positions, emotions, and values in news content.

When applied to media outlets from different countries repeatedly over time, our analysis enables diagnosis and comparison of levels of news polarisation, based on reliable, longitudinal empirical evidence. These insights – and their corresponding context and approach – provide opportunities not only to further research on polarisation across both media and political studies, but also for the practice of journalism itself. They enable journalists and researchers to investigate and reflect on the processes that generate such divisions in news reporting, as well as to identify possible feedback loops of polarisation between news content and audiences.

DMRC research program

This project contributes to the research within the following DMRC research programs:

DMRC research groups

This project contributes to the research within the following DMRC research groups:

Project team

Selected publications

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