Cross-National Patterns in Political Bias in European News Media: Joint sessions of workshops of the European Consortium of research in Antwerp

Normative theories of the role of news media in a democracy emphasize the need for the diversity and balance of political viewpoints that are expressed in news media. Positive theories of media, however, stress several possible sources of systematic political bias in media that can lead to the overrepresentation of (a) pro-business; (b) pro-governmental; (c) socially liberal; (d) centrist; (e) pro-eu; or (f) anti-immigrant and tough-on-crime views in the media. Our paper proposes new measures and introduces new data in the comparative empirical investigation of political bias in news media, provides descriptive information for most European societies about the presence, intensity and direction of bias in the news media as a whole as well as in 289 individual media outlets. We test whether there are cross-nationally prevalent patterns in the direction of bias, and whether public service and commercial media differ in the direction of the typical bias. Paper prepared for the ECPR workshop on Advancing Comparative Political Communication Research: New Frameworks, Designs and Data at the 2012 Joint Sessions of Workshops of the European Consortium for Political Research in Antwerp, Belgium.