When reporting on election results, the media declare parties as election ‘winners’ or ‘losers’, which has important consequences for voter perceptions and government formation. This article investigates news coverage of parties’ electoral performance in proportional representation systems, in which election results are often less clear‐cut compared to majoritarian systems. It tests the extent to which news coverage of parties’ electoral performance is based on objective measures or on party ideology. Its focus on the aftermath of the 2019 European Parliament election allows holding the electoral context constant across the 16 countries under study. Results from a Heckman selection model show that alongside a party's status as plurality winner and changes in electoral support, parties with radical socio‐cultural policy positions are both more likely to be covered and declared election winners in the news. These results have important implications for citizens’ attitudes and perceived party legitimacy in democratic societies.

While it is widely accepted that watching televised presidential debates helps voters stay informed about candidates and campaign issues, voters are increasingly turning to the media to learn about televised debates rather than watching them directly. Coupled with this trend is growing criticisms over presidential debates’ focus on negative attacks on opponents at the expense of policy discussions. We examine whether media outlets systematically bias the content of presidential debates, potentially amplifying their perceived negativity in presidential debates. Specifically, we theorize that the media outlets overemphasize non-policy aspects of presidential debates, because such coverage can help them draw viewer attention and is perceived to have greater news value. We further expect the continued exposure to media coverage of debates to weaken policy-related considerations in voters’ decision-making. We test these theoretical expectations using the case of the 2022 presidential election in South Korea. Using keyword-assisted topic model (keyATM), we first compare candidates’ speeches during the presidential debates with newspaper coverage of the debates. We find that non-policy topics, including personal attacks on the opponent and scandals, appeared more frequently in the newspaper coverage than in the actual debates. Next, we show that the continued exposure to media’s election coverage can reinforce voters’ tendency to base their voting decisions on non-policy issues through post-election survey data. Our findings offer significant insights into understanding media campaign coverage and its electoral significance in today’s media environment.

With environmental protests on the rise, we ask: how do they affect support for pro-environment and environment-critical movements? We answer this question using evidence from two studies—a survey experiment and media content analysis—conducted in the Netherlands, a leading country in the green transition. Our experimental findings reveal an asymmetric bias in public support for protests. For the same protest action, public support is higher for environment-critical movements compared to pro-environment ones. This bias is most pronounced among right-leaning individuals with low education and low trust in science and politics. Our content analysis traces the bias back to newspaper reporting. While attention to protest groups is balanced across tabloid and broadsheet newspapers, tabloid reporting is more negative about pro-environment movements. These results highlight an important aspect of the backlash against environmental policies: a bias against pro-environment movements within parts of the public and media.

Governments worldwide seek to influence the stories reporters write. This article examines whether and how the US government shapes the variations in domestic news outlets’ coverage of foreign leaders across time and space. Leveraging data collected from five major US newspapers on more than 1,500 foreign leaders, I find that US news outlets, acting in line with the government’s interests, tend to limit their coverage of human rights violators who are politically aligned with the USA while providing more extensive reportage on those who are not. Further evidence suggests that such biased coverage is at least partly driven by the US government’s selective information provision during press briefings and through press releases. The findings have important implications for how we understand media bias and media capture in democratic societies.

Can autocratic governments influence foreign media? This study finds that political pressures from autocrats can motivate the media in democracies to tone down their negativity. Exploiting China's sudden expulsion of American journalists in March 2020, I show that US news outlets targeted by the expulsion adopted a more positive tone toward China in their subsequent coverage, compared to outlets that were not targeted. Further analyses confirm that the observed pattern is not due to unexpelled outlets presenting more negative coverage of China, and that the expulsion has similar chilling effects on media outlets that could have been affected. The findings highlight the overt threats autocracies pose to media freedom, a fundamental pillar of democratic societies.

Extensive research in Western societies has demonstrated that media reports of protests have succumbed to selection and description biases, but such tendencies have not yet been tested in the Chinese context. This article investigates the Chinese government and news media's selection and description bias in domestic protest events reporting. Using a large protest event data set from Weibo (CASM-China), we found that government accounts on Weibo covered only 0.4 per cent of protests while news media accounts covered 6.3 per cent of them. In selecting events for coverage, the news media accounts tacitly struck a balance between newsworthiness and political sensitivity; this led them to gravitate towards protests by underprivileged social groups and shy away from protests targeting the government. Government accounts on Weibo, on the other hand, eschewed reporting on violent protests and those organized by the urban middle class and veterans. In reporting selected protest events, both government and news media accounts tended to depoliticize protest events and to frame them in a more positive tone. This description bias was more pronounced for the government than the news media accounts. The government coverage of protest events also had a more thematic (as opposed to episodic) orientation than the news media.

This paper investigates three controversies involving potential causes and consequences of information bias in case and death definitions during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. First, evidence suggests China’s surveillance data were biased and misinterpreted by the World Health Organization (WHO), prompting the WHO to advise nations to copy China’s lockdowns. China appeared to use narrow diagnostic definitions that undercounted cases and deaths. Second, novel genomic data disseminated during the pandemic without adequate guidance from rigorous epidemiologic studies biased infection control policies in many countries. A novel genomic sequence of a virus is insufficient to declare new cases of a novel disease. Third, media reports of COVID-19 surveillance data in many nations appeared to be biased. Broadened surveillance definitions captured additional information, but unadjusted surveillance data disseminated to the public are not true cases and deaths. Recommendations include clarification of the proper use of diagnostic and surveillance case and death definitions to avoid information bias.

This paper explores how factional competition shapes local media's coverage of negative political news. Employing news reports that appeared in Chinese national and local newspapers (2000–2014) coupled with data on the networks of elites, we find that local bureaucrats connected to strong national leaders tend to criticize members of weaker factions in politically damaging news reports. These adverse reports indeed harm the promotion prospects of the province leaders reported on in the articles, weakening the already weak factions and expanding the relative power of the strong factions. Our findings suggest that the loyalty-based competitive behaviors of political elites further tilt an already uneven playing field across political factions and facilitate power concentration in China.

In recent years, concerns about misinformation in the media have skyrocketed. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that various news outlets are disseminating ‘fake news’ for political purposes. But when the information contained in mainstream media news reports provides no clear clues about its truth value or any indication of a partisan slant, do people rely on the congeniality of the news outlet to judge whether the information is true or false? In a survey experiment, we presented partisans (Democrats and Republicans) and ideologues (liberals and conservatives) with a news article excerpt that varied by source shown (CNN, Fox News, or no source) and content (true or false information), and measured their perceived accuracy of the information contained in the article. Our results suggest that the participants do not blindly judge the content of articles based on the news source, regardless of their own partisanship and ideology. Contrary to prevailing views on the polarization and politicization of news outlets, as well as on voters' growing propensity to engage in ‘partisan motivated reasoning,’ source cues are not as important as the information itself for partisans on both sides of the aisle.

This research explores media reporting of Indigenous students’ Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results in two national and 11 metropolitan Australian newspapers from 2001 to 2015. Of almost 300 articles on PISA, only 10 focused on reporting of Indigenous PISA results. While general or non-Indigenous PISA results featured in media reports, especially at the time of the publication of PISA results, there was overwhelming neglect of Indigenous results and the performance gap. A thematic analysis of articles showed mainstream PISA reporting had critical commentary which is not found in the Indigenous PISA articles. The three themes identified include: a lack of teacher quality in remote and rural schools; the debate on Gonski funding recommendations and the PISA achievement gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. This study concluded the overwhelming neglect is linked to media bias, which continues to drive mainstream media coverage of Indigenous Australians.