Ever have the feeling that news used to be more objective? That news organizations — now media empires — have moved into the realm of entertainment? Or that a cluster of news “across the aisle” from your beliefs is completely outrageous?
Many have these feelings, and coverage is rampant on bias and even straight up “fake” facts in news reporting.
With this in mind, we wanted to see if these hunches are valid. Has news gotten more negative over time? Is it a portion of the political spectrum driving this change? Or is it simply that bad things happen in the world and later get reported on?
To jump into this inquiry we utilized Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph. Diffbot is one of the few North American organizations to crawl the entire web. We apply AI-enabled web scrapers to pages that are publicly available to extract entities — think people, places, or things — and facts — think job titles, topics, and funding rounds.
We started our inquiry with some external coverage on bias in journalism provided by AllSides Media Bias Ratings.
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