How news outlets target audiences

The mass media is one of the social forces with the most active transformative power. However, news reach people unequally. In this blog, Erick Elejalde, from the L3S Research Centre in Hannover, Germany, explains how to go about exploring the many biases of the distribution patterns of news outlets, as detailed in最近的文章inEPJ Data Science.

This blog has been cross-posted from theSpringerOpen blog

许多因素塑造了新闻媒体报道的分布和影响。其中一些因素是报纸(国家与区域报纸)的地理覆盖范围,人口特定部门的直接靶向和/或媒体渠道本身的政治意识形态。

大众媒体政治经济学的研究表明,要吸引广告商并增加其利润,商店将试图满足目标人群的期望,而不是公平地对待新闻。例如,一些广告客户会更喜欢具有高购买力的目标受众或某些政治颜色的渠道。

In a media system driven by profit, areas of low population density, minorities, and low-income classes will be relatively under-served and underrepresented in mainstream news coverage

It follows that in a media system driven by profit, areas of low population density, minorities, and low-income classes will be relatively under-served and underrepresented in mainstream news coverage. This creates a negative feedback loop that ends up neglecting (policy-wise) some of the most vulnerable segments of society just for having limited access to the media.

To date, there has been comparatively little large-scale, quantitative research on the relationship between the quality and diversity of the content generated by the media, and the socioeconomic indices of a particular area of coverage.Our study帮助确定媒体的覆盖范围是否偏离了纯粹的地理影响,涉及政治和社会经济利益的重量的更复杂的行为。

Santiago, Chile
Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

智利:案例研究

We examined the degree to which different geographic locations in the same regions are covered by existing news outlets using Chilean social media data. More precisely, we quantified how much of the geographic distribution of Twitter followers could be explained by a natural geographic targeting (e.g., local newspapers will give more importance to local news), and how much could be attributed to the political and socioeconomic profile of the areas they serve.

We found that the coverage of most regional/local outlets can be almost entirely explained just by the geographic location of their users. However, for an important number of other outlets, most of them located in the capital city (i.e., Santiago) and with a national scope, the geographic information explains very little or none of their coverage.

News outlets systematically prefer followers from densely populated areas with a specific socioeconomic profile

巧合的是,这些媒体引起了最大的兴趣,因为它们是具有最突出的政治和社会经济偏见的媒体,因为它们是最有影响力的人,并且是主导新闻作品的人。他们的领先地位还确保他们在广告商的投资中获得最重要的份额。因此,这些插座是最容易受到外部压力的。

Further analysis suggests that these news outlets systematically prefer followers from densely populated areas with a specific socioeconomic profile. The political leaning of the commune proved to be also a good indicator on the prediction of the level of readership ratings. These findings support the claim that describes the mass media outlets as profit-driven companies that focus on acquiring a high “quality” audience.

If we think of news outlets as a profit-oriented business, we notice that they are perfectly rational in their effort to select the content that generates a higher return. It is only when we try to hold on to the traditional view of news outlets as servers of the common good and advocates of democracy that the concept of bias becomes relevant again. Whatever the case, given the influence that news outlets have in society, readers should be well aware of their behavior to be able to process the information they distribute appropriately.

查看有关社会主页的最新帖子金博宝188app网站

注释