Partisan bias in the news is a perennial matter of concern and debate for scholars, journalists, politicians, and citizens. Although there are abundant opinions about the magnitude, direction, and even existence of media bias, producing a scholarly consensus on the issue has proven difficult for several reasons. In particular, scholars studying media bias empirically must overcome problems of subjectivity, strategic behavior by the actors involved in the process, and especially the absence of suitable baselines against which to assess bias. This article reviews some approaches to studying media bias and explores several promising strategies and tools scholars have developed to help overcome these obstacles. I conclude with suggestions for future research in the area.
More voters than ever get political news from their friends on social media platforms. Is this bad for democracy? Using context-neutral laboratory experiments, we find that biased (mis)information shared on social networks affects the quality of collective decisions relatively more than does segregation by political preferences on social media. Two features of subject behavior underlie this finding: 1) they share news signals selectively, revealing signals favorable to their candidates more often than unfavorable signals; 2) they na¨ively take signals at face value and account for neither the selection in the selection in the shared signals nor the differential informativeness of news signals across different sources.
Berzelius failed to make use of Faraday's electrochemical laws in his laborious determination of equivalent weights.