Abstract
A nagging concern that has emerged from media bias is its over-riding and manipulative power to influence public opinion and perception. When this bias is unleashed on consumers of news, it can have a devastating consequence on news production and consumption. Since most casual readers take their news from the headlines without reading the accompanying stories, it is more disturbing when newspapers, with their eyes on profit, tantalize the reading public with biased headlines. Against this background, a corpus of 80 headlines culled from four Ghanaian private newspapers was analysed to explore the infusion of bias in headlines in the coverage of the 2012 Ghana Presidential Election Petition. The results showed that a high percentage (81.5%) of the headlines was biased. It was also found out that influenced by which side of the petition the newspapers supported, they employed word choice as the main type of bias, using linguistic choices such as negative words, invectives and loaded words. The findings have implications for media objectivity and fair reportage devoid of ideological slant and judgmental opinions.
Highlights
Quite a number of journalists and news producers within the mass media select which events and stories they deem fit, and decide to report them to suit their ideological or political inclination
It was found out that bias by word choice was the main type of bias used in the headlines; and the strategies employed by the newspapers included the use of negative words, invectives and loaded words
The fact that 66.15 % of the biased headlines came from The Statesman and the Daily Guide suggests that bias was wittingly infused in their headlines to make the case of the petitioners look good and that of the respondents look bad in the eyes of casual readers
Summary
Quite a number of journalists and news producers within the mass media select which events and stories they deem fit, and decide to report them to suit their ideological or political inclination. In the words of O’ Sullivan et al (2003), “the front page or cover of newspapers and magazines is the key to creating both a sense of identity and a point of contact with the potential reader” (p.122) This is because a lot of casual readers take their news directly from the headlines without reading the full story. The New Statesman is a private daily newspaper affiliated to the New Patriotic Party, which is the largest opposition party as of the time of writing this paper It reports on varied local and international issues. Democrat is affiliated to the NDC and for that matter more or less a mouthpiece of the party It is a private daily newspaper opposed to the NPP and comments negatively on its activities. The political stories are mostly about the two major political parties: the NDC and the NPP, because these stories sell, especially in an election year
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