Exploring Perceptions of Fairness in News Coverage across 46 Countries

• In Event: News Coverage and Its Effects

Abstract

Over recent decades, public trust in the news media has decreased in many countries across the world, with lower news consumption and higher news avoidance among particular political partisans, women, and young people (Gottfried & Liedke, 2021; Newman et al., 2021; Toff & Palmer, 2019). Scholars have increasingly studied perceived media hostility and bias among these groups as well as actual bias in news content covering them (Basdogan, Ozdogan, & Huber, 2021; Hooghe, Jacobs, & Claes, 2015; Luqiu & Yang, 2018; Usher, Holcomb, & Littman, 2018). These patterns are compounded by growing concerns about diversity in journalism: Recent social and political movements have turned public and academic attention toward gender, racial and ethnic, and political disparities in newsrooms (Gottfried & Barthel, 2020; Gray, 2020; Tameez, 2020), and their implications for how people perceive journalism’s ability to fairly report on these groups, and the knock-on effect this has for political attitudes and participation.
This study examines how global audiences think about how the news media cover people like them. We hypothesized that women and younger people are more likely to say the news media unfairly covers people of their gender and age, respectively. Similarly, we expected that left/right partisans are more likely to perceive news coverage of their political views as unfair.
We used online survey data in 46 markets from the Reuters Institute’s 2021 Digital News Report (N=92,372) to investigate public perceptions of fairness in news coverage of people’s own 1) political views, 2) gender, and 3) age. Respondents were asked whether they think the news media in their country cover each “fairly” or “unfairly,” with a third option of “don’t know.” We estimate separate linear regression models for each country, controlling for a series of individual-level sociodemographic, news use, and news attitude variables.
Our findings provide at least partial support for our hypotheses, with evidence of associations between respondents’ political views, gender, and age, and their perceptions of fair news coverage. In most countries, partisans on the political left or right are more likely to perceive news coverage as unfair: In 29 countries, at least one partisan side is significantly more likely to perceive news coverage as unfair, and in seven countries, partisans on both sides are less likely than political centrists to perceive news coverage as fair. In 15 countries, women are significantly more likely to perceive news coverage as unfair. Even more importantly, there are no countries in which women are significantly more likely than men to perceive news coverage as fair. In 10 countries, younger people are significantly more likely to perceive news coverage as unfair. However, we also find more consistent evidence of a curved relationship between age and fairness, where both the youngest and oldest age groups are more likely to think they are covered unfairly than those in the middle age groups. Finally, we show how one or more of these patterns persist across a diverse range of geographic regions and political and media systems: Only four out of 46 countries don’t produce any significant results for perceptions of fair news coverage of political views, age, or gender.
Taken together, our results reveal several fault lines in public attitudes toward news coverage. We argue that public perceptions of media fairness are real and important in themselves, regardless of whether they are empirically grounded, because of how they might shape people’s news use, trust in democracy and mainstream media institutions, and willingness to accept democratic outcomes (Ardèvol-Abreu & Gil de Zúñiga, 2017; Tsafi & Cohen, 2005). And, they are critically important for journalists and news organizations to consider as they increasingly rethink their staffing, newsroom, and news content practices.

Authors

• Kirsten Eddy, Oxford University

• Richard Fletcher, University of Oxford