Large scale analysis of violent death count in daily newspapers to quantify bias and censorship

Abstract

In this work we develop a series of techniques and tools to determine and quantify the presence of bias and censorship in newspapers. These algorithms are tested analyzing the occurrence of keywords ‘killed’ and ‘suicide’ (‘morti’’, ‘suicidio’ in Italian) and their changes over time, gender and reported location on the complete online archives (42 million records) of the major US newspaper (The New York Times) and the three major Italian ones (Il Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, La Stampa). Using these tools, since the Italian language distinguishes between the female and male cases, we find the presence of gender bias in all Italian newspapers, with reported single female deaths to be about one-third of those involving single men. Analyzing the historical trends, we show evidence of censorship in Italian newspapers both during World War 1 and during the Italian Fascist regime. Censorship in all countries during World Wars and in Italy during the Fascist period is a historically ascertained fact, but so far there was no estimate on the amount on censorship in newspaper reporting: in this work we estimate that about 75% of domestic deaths and suicides were not reported. This is also confirmed by statistical analysis of the distribution of the least significant digit of the number of reported deaths. We also find that the distribution function of the number of articles vs. the number of deaths reported in articles follows a power law, which is broken (with fewer articles being written) when reporting on few deaths occurring in foreign countries. The lack of articles is found to grow with geographical distance from the nation where the newspaper is being printed. Whereas the assessment of the truth of a single article or the debunking of what are now called ‘fake news’ requires specific fact-checking and becomes more difficult as time goes by, these methods can be used in historical analysis and to evaluate quantitatively the amount of bias and censorship present in other printed or online publication and can thus contribute to quantitatively assess the freedom of the press in a given country. Furthermore, they can be applied in wider contexts such as the evaluation of bias toward specific ethnic groups or specific accidents.