Ideology Detection in the Indian Mass Media

Abstract

Ideological biases in the mass media can shape public opinion. In this study, we aim to understand ideological bias in the Indian mass media, in terms of the coverage it provides to statements made by prominent people on key economic and technology policies. We build an end-to-end system that starts with a news article and parses it to obtain statements made by people in the article; on these statements, we apply a Recursive Neural Network based model to detect whether the statements express an ideological bias or not. The system then classifies the stance of the non-neutral statements. For economic policies, we determine if the statements express a pro or anti slant about the policy, and for technology policies, we determine if the statements are positive or skeptical about technology. The proposed research method can be applied to other domains as well and can serve as a basis to contrast social media self-expression by prominent people with how the mass media portrays them.