The American media has come under attack in the past several years for it’s bias, but this attack comes from a non academic sphere. Often news organizations proudly declare themselves as the arbitrators of truth. But we are all conditioned with biases from our environments. Media is a business, and as such, it is logical to ask in what ways is content driven by advertisers/viewers? Can we quantify how these biases and influences effect news coverage?
Our goal is to have real discussions on how bias plays into media coverage. In particular, we want to focus on the democratic primaries. How does media coverage of the primaries differ across platforms? Is there a distinction in how internet publications treat candidates versus public television? How will foreign newspapers treat the primaries? Does gender/race play a role in coverage of candidates? Does economic policy? How do these characteristics play into coverage across platforms? Does polling data reflect coverage, or does coverage reflect polling data? These are the types of questions that we want to pursue. Feel free to brain storm more ideas
Hopefully we can get a group of 4 or 5 people interested in this topic. We can then talk about each other’s strengths and weaknesses and see how we can work together to get the project off the ground. I don’t personally have a background in data engineering, programming, or Computer Science(eeeek). So feel free to contribute, but here’s the general work flow I envision
Reach out to me at justinherman42@gmail.com or via the slack channel
I list some possible API’s for us to query below. I post the entire link. You don’t know me so feel free to put link into google to check they are legitimate