Analysis of Media Bias in Policy Discourse in India

Many citizens consume information on government policies from the mass media. Consequently, biases existing in the policy discourse in media sources may influence citizens’ understanding of the policies, about how they may affect diverse communities. These biases may also get amplified further through social media if it simply echoes the biases of mass media content. We build methods to quantify media bias in terms of preferred treatment given to certain issues corresponding to four economic policies, and alignment observed with the ideological stance of different political parties. We also examine how the social media community of followers of these media houses contribute to the policy discourse. Other than being one of the first large scale studies in the Indian context, our work contributes towards creating a standardized methodology to assess the ideological stance of a news-source, and its alignment with the social media discourse of its follower community. We find that the Indian mass media exhibits bias towards certain aspects or topics related to policy events. It also provides a significantly high coverage to aspects concerning the middle class and to political statements, neglecting the aspects directly relevant to the poor. Additionally, we find evidence of bias also in the representation provided to different political parties in the media. Social media seems to echo these biases rather than mitigate them. The tools and methods developed in this work can be useful for media watchdog institutions to call out biases in the media, and advocate for more complete coverage of issues across different news sources.