Measuring media bias in China

Abstract

Major advances in research on media bias have been achieved in recent years. However, methods used in the literature are primarily applied to American media and usually dependent on the two-party system. This paper attempts to detect and quantify the principal difference, or ‘media bias’, of Chinese media. We extract a document-term matrix from articles on the Eighteenth Party Congress in November 2012 from 21 Chinese newspapers from seven provinces, as well as the People's Daily. With this matrix, hierarchical clustering is subsequently used to divide newspapers into two groups. Using the dendrogram and intergroup dissimilarities, we can construct an index to indicate the direction and the magnitude of media bias. In our sample, newspapers from Zhejiang and Guangdong constitute one group, and the rest constitute the other group. The principal difference of Chinese media is reflected in two dimensions: central/local and political/economic.