A recent study suggests most are near the centre.

It is a standard trope of the American Right that the US media has a leftwing bias. This of course, depends on where the centre is located. I have heard, for instance, the New Zealand left arguing that the New Zealand media is biased to the right.

A recent New Zealand contribution comes from a site ‘media bias’. It selected articles that discuss New Zealand politics, extracted references to members of parliament and political parties and analysed the sentiment of each sentence. Each of 15 media sites was then scaled on a right-left dimension.

Before giving the results, I note that it is only looking at politics in a narrow sense of politicians and parties. Even more importantly, it makes a political judgement about each sentiment.

The site’s author is not trained in politics. But is ‘a self-employed Computer Scientist with a PhD in Computer Science ....working in the field of robotics, machine learning and data science.’ Like all of us, he/she will have their biases although they may not be as aware of the problem as someone with some politics training.

Nevertheless we should treat the findings with respect, if with critical scepticism. I am not going to report the raw scores, but transform them to z-scores. (I find it useful to interpret the scores in term of a normal/gaussian distribution.) The transformation is as follows:

- The mean of the 15 scores was set at zero, which is equivalent to the media defining the political centre rather than the computer scientist. This is an (admittedly mildly right) economics assumption that in a competitive market, business will on average locate near the centre although some will compete for market segments away from it. The market defines the centre, not you, me ofethe anonymous mediabias analyst.

- I have scaled the standard deviation of the distribution to unity. That is to reduce getting distracted by the width of the scale.

The resulting scores of the 15 news-sites are as follows, ranked from the right at the top to the left at the bottom:

RIGHT

• Kiwiblog                     2.85

• The BFD                     1.38

• NZ Herald                   0.29

• Politik                         0.07

• Stuff                            0.04

• The Spinoff                 -0.07

• NewstalkZB                -0.11

• Newsroom                   -0.15

• Interest.co.nz              -0.16

• Radio NZ                    -0.31

• TVNZ                          -0.36

• Newshub                     -0.45

• The Daily Blog           -0.64

• Scoop                          -0.94

• The Standard               -1.44

  LEFT

The overall conclusion is that three of the fifteen are at the extremities – Kiwiblog, The BFD, The Standard (perhaps Scoop). The rest are close to the centre. For instance, at 0.29 the NZ Herald, has about 60 percent of the political weight on its left and 40 percent on its right; the balance for RNZ is roughly the other way around. In contrast Kiwiblog has 99 percent on its left and 1 percent on its right.

So the majority of our media hover around the centre, but there are the inevitable outliers seeking political markets away from it (within the limits of ‘mediabias’s scoring system).

As a footnote, I was intrigued by this research which concluded that ‘Culture wars are fought by tiny minority’. It found that found that 12% of voters accounted for 50% of all social media users. To simplify, the noisy do not reflect the silent majority.

PS. For the record, the NZ news-sites I regularly visit score an average of 0.26 (i.e. slightly to the right), about the same as the NZ Herald.