Biased Media Reporting and Our Understanding of Global Unrest

• In Event: Critical Challenges and Solutions towards (Re)Constructing Conflict Datasets

Abstract

News reports of political violence from around the world are being compiled into large conflict-event datasets that are used by governments, international organizations, think tanks, and academics in their efforts to understand conflict around the globe. While these datasets present various opportunities to examine the micro-dynamics of conflict, there are many reasons to suspect that the data may be skewed in ways that limit their value or, worse, lead their users to erroneous conclusions. Specifically, the news media is both constrained in their ability to report on violent events and may actively choose not to report others. In this project, compare various news-report based datasets to high quality administrative records of wartime violence and other forms of social unrest maintained by government security forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, and South Africa to identify specific sources of systematic missingness in media reports of conflict. After identifying specific biases, we then establish their substantive significance in a large replication exercise.

Author

• Andrew C Shaver, University of California, Merced