The Left, the Right, and the Powerful - A Cross-Country Evaluation of Bias in Television Election News Coverage

• In Event: Rethinking Notions of Balance and Bias in the News

Abstract

With every new election cycle, the question of fair and balanced news reporting receives new attention by politicians, journalists and scholars once again. Since the media are the most important institution in informing the electorate on candidates and their political programs, impartial coverage on the election is an essential part of a healthy democracy. Nevertheless, claims about biased news reporting are not limited to one singular country, but brought forward in almost all modern Western democracies. In this paper, we take a comparative approach and explore whether there is transnational evidence for a liberal media bias and incumbency advantage. We conducted a content analysis of election campaign coverage on the main TV news programs in five countries (France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and the United States) between 2007 and 2010. A separate analysis of (1) sound and image bite news and (2) metacoverage found no clear pattern for either liberal bias or an incumbency advantage. However, when combining the two analyses, our results hint towards a more favorable treatment of left incumbent candidates across most of the dimensions under study. This finding directs attention to a hitherto unexplored variant of advocative election news coverage in the form of liberal incumbency bias.

Authors

• Desiree Wilhelmine Steppat, U of Zurich

• Florin Buechel, U of Zurich

• Frank Esser, U of Zurich