In most democratic societies, traditional media are meant to keep political powers in check but what happens when a newspaper or television channel adopts the rhetoric of a party or ideology? CEU political scientist Gabor Toka and his colleague Prof. Marina Popescu of the University of Essex analyzed data from Popescu’s online survey about standards of reporting in leading national media in Europe. To see how media bias impact citizens, they complemented their source on the former with data from the 2009 European Election Study. The latter is the only data set that provides cross-nationally comparable data on both citizens’ level of political interest and their political knowledge for a sufficiently large number of countries to allow for meaningful correlational analysis across a diverse set of media environments. In all, the analysis covered 24 European countries.
“One central issue in this debate is whether politically partisan media channels that advocate certain policy positions can be both engaging and informative,” Toka says. “More specifically, we ask under which circumstances journalists can fulfill the information role that is assigned to mass media in all variants of democratic theory and journalism.”
Toka and Popescu found no evidence that a media outlet’s partisan stance would directly reduce its viewers’ level of political knowledge. At the same time, they found evidence demonstrating that a clearly partisan orientation may increase political interest. However, dedication to accuracy and political balance in reporting correlates very negatively with the intensity of the outlet’s partisan commitment and has a sizeable positive effect of its own on viewers’ knowledge level and interest in politics.
“All this vindicates the view that politically partisan commitment among media outlets is probably not as detrimental for the democratic process as it is usually thought to be,” Toka says. “Yet it proves difficult—though not impossible—to reconcile it with a commitment to traditionally understood good journalism, i.e. balanced coverage of different perspectives and accuracy in reporting facts.”
Toka and Popescu also researched cross-national patterns in political bias in the news media. They were looking in particular for overrepresentation of certain political perspectives such as pro-business, pro-EU, and anti-immigration in the 289 media outlets covered by Popescu’s original data collection. They then compared the partisan leaning of national news media outlets (the eight to 10 most important television channels and newspapers) to the voter support for the given political parties in the most recent national elections. They then made these results cross-nationally comparable using the issue positions of the parties, rather than just a vague left-right orientation.
Overall, Toka and Popescu found that public and private television channels convey a very weak but, across nations, fairly consistent bias towards centrist political views, with public TV leaning center-left and private TV leaning center-right. The researchers’ cross-national findings indicate that public TV is typically more supportive of moderate, socially liberal opinions on economic and non-economic issues; while private TV channels more often echo the views of parties that espouse center-right views on economics. Both public and private TV channels convey the views of government parties more often than people may expect from strictly neutral stations.
Photo: CEU/Daniel Vegel