Selecting Articles
The articles were selected based of off 1. The political history of the news channel and 2. The story that was covered in the article. In 2016, topics that received the most bias reporting revolved around the two presidential candidates. For Hillary Clinton, her email scandal was a major topic of discussion among conservative news sources, like Fox 43. I was looking at only a small sample due to time constraints and limited resources to research with.
I searched using keyword phrases to find articles that talked about the email scandal. For Donald Trump, areas that discusses his Tax policies were a major topic covered by liberal media sources, like the Gettysburg Times. Similarly to Fox 43, I used keyword searches and searched through old newspaper archives to find stories on Trump. This stories often presented facts, but the story was worded to demonize the Republican Party as a whole .
Most of these articles were found on the news source site themselves. The others were found via The Newspaper Archive. For your own benefit, these websites below all are great tools that allow you to analyze news stories to check for bias reporting and fact checking.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fox-news/
https://www.cjr.org/innovations/measure-media-bias-partisan.php
Picking Digital Tools
The digital tools that I used all were chosen because I believed they visualized my research in a way that was both aesthetically pleasing and practical.
- Timeline Js offered me a visual way to show the progression of the articles and how close to Election Day they were published.
- Voyant Tools allowed me to run a number of text analysis tests and provided me with useful and interactive visuals.
Analyzing Data
When looking at the data received through my text analysis, I was able to find some useful information. I used the corpus information to find what terms were most talked about and related it to the general ideology of the news source. For example, Fox and the local Fox 43 network has a past of being more conservative favoring while NBC and the local MSNBC station have a past of being more liberal favoring.
