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PSCI 4490: Policymaking Process

This guide is for PSCI 4490: Policymaking Process.

List of News Databases

The UNT Libraries collection contains many news sources. Here is a list of some the databases we have have that provide news sources.

Finding Newspapers in the Catalog and Databases

Finding Newspapers in the Catalog and Databases

In addition to Pressreader, we have access to other newspaper through different databases and the catalog. The instructions below show the three ways to access newspapers. Images of each step are provided to help you navigate the web pages.

Please note the catalog option refers to the Old Catalog system and not the new Discover Catalog. The steps are basically same but some screens will look different. If you need help, AskUs or contact a librarian.

Tip for Success

Please note that searching for news in databases will not give you the same browseability as searching on the newspapers’ website. You will need to think about your search methods in the same manner that you do when doing searches for literature reviews.  

Option 1: Find a Database with Newspapers via Database A-Z 

  1. Click on the “Database” tab. Then click on the phrase “about 600.”  

Image shows UNT Libraries homepage with arrows and directions for step 1.

  1. Click on the “All Database Types” dropdown box and select “Newspapers.” Image shows visual of step 2 using arrows and "click here" commentary.
  2. Select one of the 19 databases below. 

These databases have been indexed our system with the “newspaper” as a type. They are listed in alphabetical order by the name of the database.

Option 2: Find Newspapers via Database Subject Search

  1. Click on the “Database” tab. Then click in the “Browse Subject” search box. Type “Newspapers” in the box.

Image shows direction arrows of where to click and explains to click in the search box, type “newspapers,” and hit the enter button on your keyboard.

  1. Select one of the 36 databases below.

Image shows search results. These databases have been indexed our system with the “newspaper” as a subject. They are listed in alphabetical order by the name of the database.

Option 3: Find a Newspaper by Title in the Catalog

  1. Click on the “Books & More” tab. Change the search function drop down from the default "keyword" to “journal title.” Enter the title of the newspaper in the search box and click search.

Image provide directional arrows of where to click to perform the search. Image makes note to enter the title of the newspaper. in the main search box and click on the dropdown and change the search function from the default keyword to journal title.

  1. Click on the hyperlinked name of the newspaper. It should the first option with either 1 or 2 entries.

Images shows search results.

  1. Click on the hyperlinked name of the online version of the newspaper in the second record listed. This is the record that you want to access. The first record is for a physical periodical in remote storage. This record is for an item that has not circulated in 10 years and will have limited access to the user.

Images shows search results of two records. The first record is for a physical periodical in remote storage. This record is for an item that has not circulated in 10 years and will have access to the user. The second image is for an online periodical. This is the record that you want to access.

  1. Review the date range of coverage provide by the database list. Options without an end date have present content. Use the dates and database options to select a database of choice. Click on the “Find It” button to access the database. You will then be taken to the database landing page.

This image explains record page. The dates of access are listed in the first column. The databases with the newspaper are listed in the second column. Use the dates and database list to choose a database in which to access the newspaper. You will want to choose a database you are familiar with if that is possible. Based on the databases available, I (personally) would choose Nexis Uni because I am already familiar with it. When you have found a databse that provide the date range that you need, click the find it button.

Evaluating News Resources

Biased Language and Political Ideology

A Quick Review

Welcome to Lesson 1! Before we get started, we need to define two terms to make sure everyone is on the same page. These terms are  political ideology and biased language. 

Political Ideology

Political ideology is set of ideas, beliefs, values, and opinions, exhibiting a recurring pattern, that competes deliberately as well as unintentionally over providing plans of action for public policy making in an attempt to justify, explain, contest, or change the social and political arrangements and processes of a political community1. Political ideology informs a persons' political party affiliation, shapes their civic engagement like voting behavior, and determines how they consume news and media. Often when talking about political ideology, we discuss a political spectrum of most liberal to moderate to most conservative or some being leftist or rightist.

In the video, we will learn about the difference between conservative and liberal views and the the 4 main factors that influence political ideology. This video is about 9 minutes long and closed captioning is available. It is highly recommended that you watch this video.
Crash Course VIDEO LINK | Crash Course. 2015. "Political Ideologies: Political Ideology: Crash Course Government and Politics #35." Uploaded October 2015 in partnership with PBS Digital Studios 8:46.

Craig mentioned a few other political ideologies besides liberal and conservative like libertarian, progressives, socialist. However, he doesn't explain where they fall on the political spectrum or define them.

If you would like to learn about these concepts, this Washington Journal interview with Dr. Ferrel (2009) provides a detailed summary of the "isms" of political ideology (C-Span. 2009. "Political Ideologies." Filmed December  20009 in Washington, District of Columbia. C-Span 29:23.) 

The "isms" discussed include socialism, communism, fascism, etc. He also places them in context of history and discourse. This is a good review of terms and the video provides a q/a with callers. However, you don't need to watch the whole interview since it is a long video at 29 minutes. Here are some timestamps for definitions: 

  • Socialism: 0:34-1:19
  • Fascism: 1:19-2:08
  • Socialism VS Fascism: 2:08-4:01
  • Communism & Stalinism: 6:00-8:00
  • Neo-Conservatism VS Conservatism: 10:53-12:31
  • Progressivism VS Liberalism: 17:00-18:39

 

Critical Thinking Questions 

On a sheet of paper answer the following questions.

  • Consider the terms Neo-Conservatism, Conservatism, Progressivism, Liberalism. Do you think the differences of these terms or our use has changed in the last 10 years? Why or why not? 
  • Based on these definitions or ones presented in your coursework, how would you define Democratic Socialism, Democratic Capitalism, Constitutional Conservatism, and Centristism from the other terms examined?  

Bias

A bias is an inclination of temperament or outlook; especially: a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgement2. People are natural bias or subjective toward things they like or against things they don't like. Biased language can apply to any expression about a thing could be as prejudice in favor or against something, a person, or a group compared with another. In academia, we often talk about bias when analyzing journal articles and news sources, and when evaluating the accuracy and reliability of a source. Types of bias can include:

  • Selection and omission of information
  • Misleading information out of context
  • Word choice and tone used in presentation
  • Source control or authority 
  • Skewed statistics/crowd counts presented in data
  • Participating in "group think" about a topic

Here are some examples of biased language and bias-free alternatives from ThoughtCo:

Image provides examples of biased language and bias-free language. Biased Language: If he is elected, he would be the first person of color in the White House; ;He has had the physical handicap since he was 5 years old; There are many elderly people in our town. Alternatives: lf he is elected, he would be the first African-American in the White House; He has had the physical impairment since he was 5 years old; There are many senior citizens (or seniors) in our town.

Nordquist, Richard. 2020. "Biased Language Definition and Examples." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-biased-language-1689168 (Links to an external site.). Accessed March 11, 2020.

In physical news sources, bias can include where a story is placed in the publication. For news media like broadcasts, it can include a strategically placed camera for a particular view.

Typically in academia, biased news sources do not provide the quality of coverage that is acceptable for research. Research should be objective and without bias. Objectivity, expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices,of interpretations3, is the opposite of bias.

Intersections of Biased Language and Political Ideology in the News

Biased language and political ideology intersect often in our daily lives: from meeting people on the street to the stores and restaurants we visits.However, the encounters that are the most informative and affect us the most are from the news. Whether from a paper, website, podcast or radio, channel broadcast, or social media post, the news is pervasive in our physical and online environments. The news is often ripe with language that reflects the values, views, and biases of one political ideologies over another. News sources can "support" one ideology over other by having their journalist report on certain issues or write their reports in certain ways, which can perpetuate the circulation of news skewed with biases. (More on this in the next lesson.) Often this bias and political ideology is represented by word choice or tone in an article; however, there are 11 methods that reporters can use to direct their coverage toward a specific bias or political ideology. These methods include:

  1. Spinning by using vague, dramatic, or sensational language;
  2. Making unsubstantiated claims with no evidence (a type of fake news);
  3. Presenting opinions as facts (a type of fake news);
  4. Using language to shock or draw a emotional responses from a readers;
  5. Slandering an individual by "mudslinging" or "ad hominem";
  6. Assuming reader's opinion by employing group-think, pack journalism, or master narrative techniques;
  7. Slanting the coverage to tell part of a story;
  8. Using flawed logic by jumping to conclusions or misrepresenting a fact (a type of fake news);
  9. Omitting coverage that supports a differing view of an event;
  10. Omitting a source or failing to provide an attribution; and
  11. Placing content strategically in a newspaper print, on a website layout, or at "prime time" of a broast cast.

This list comes from All Sides4 (2020), a company devoted to balanced news. From this list, I want you to pay particular attention to #7 and #9. Slanting a story or omitting (or even favoring) coverage of a story are two methods that direct media coverage toward a political ideology. By telling a one-side story that leaves out details that the public should know, readers are exposed to a limited version of the truth. In this case, readers are only told a truth that they might agree with because it aligns with their own opinions about the situation. This is called political slant, Lesson 2 is just about this phenomenon because it has a huge affect on markets and readership. In Lesson 2, I want you to pay particular attention to the video by Alisa Miller because she talks about how the perpetuation of political slant can limit the how Americans get international news from domestic news sources. Further, she provides a great example of the affects of when news coverage gets hyper focused on a topic.

What do I mean by hyper focused on a topic? Journalists often cover stories in order to just "cover their bases" or meet market expectation5. This means that "everyone is reporting on this so I must too". Unfortunately, when this happens, news cycles generate a trend for the same story to get repeated coverage throughout a day (with little deviation) instead of new opportunities. When markets approve this practice, outlets cater to the same types of stories because it shows that readers like the content. Consider the Notre-Dame Fire, for example. If you watched the news on April 15, 2019, the fire was the main story on most news outlets. Many of the reports sounded the same due to the limited US reporters in France - many US news outlets re-reported the event from the original coverage. If your starting to feel like this whole process is circular, it is. That's the problem, and it only gets worse when we embed political slant further into the equation.

Optional Learning Activity

Learning how to identify bias language is a useful skill when intending to news sources in your research. The activity below will help you learn and utilize those skills.

Understanding Political Slant

When journalist talk about "political slant," they are referring to the political subjectivity of the coverage. When you hear the phrases "left leaning" or "right leaning," the person means the political subjectivity of the source. The slant of a source is determined by the demands of market audience and journalists use bias language to fit their stories within a political ideological lens and skew the slant to satisfy the reader/viewer-ship. It's called a slant because the term refers to a source's position on scale or spectrum much like the Political Spectrum for that describes a person's ideology.

Image of the Political Spectrum shows a double-sided arrow. The left side is the word left and right is the word right. Along the line are 5 ideaolgies and their position on the line. They read radical far left, liberal left of centre, moderate centre, conservative right of center, and ultra-conservative far right.

KnowledgeWalk Institute. 2020. "Politics: The Basics." Caribean Elections.   http://www.caribbeanelections.com/education/politics/politics.asp (Links to an external site.). Accessed March 5, 2020.

Let's put this into context: Pretend you are a journalist employed by a news source that targets millennials with a democratic socialist political ideology. In order to satisfy the expectation of this audience, the journalist will use language (including tone) that supports this view when covering a topic or event. If you, as a journalist, used different language, let's say one that appeals to an ultra-conservative from Gen X or a centrist/moderate Boomer, then the audience of your employing news source would find that article unsatisfactory - the article goes against the slant of the news source. When the bias of news matches the slant of the news sources, sales go up for the source controlled by consumers. 

In order to understand this relationship more, I selected the following articles for you to read. 

Readings

Journalists may choose to only interview people that support the slant of their news outlet. This journalistic technique ensures that there is a shared partisan ideology between the interviewee and the audience so that the audience will maintain satisfied with the paper. By focusing their content to people and events that will satisfy their readers, the news source do not cover many critical event in our country or the world. Readers become isolated.

Please watch this video by Alisa Miller (2008). It is 5:02 minutes long and includes closed captioning. | Miller, Alisa. 2008. "How the News Distorts Our Worldview." Filmed March 2008 in Monterey, California. TED video 4:11.

Although the examples might be a little dated, this talk by Alisa Miller provides an excellent analysis of media bias and the influence its bias has on our perceptions. Domestic news outlets tend to only cover what they think Americans are interested in due to the slant of their readership. When combined with the 50% reduction of domestic new outlets global offices, as Miller (2008) reports, we see a very limited perception of the world. Remember that green-blob that is Iraq in her presentation? That blob is large because there was a surge in the Iraq War in 2007. News sources, regardless of their slant, would have been making investments to cover news there because of the political and domestic interest of the world.

To summarize, political slant of a news sources is ultimately influenced by the demand of the new sources readership and is reinforced by the choices in what to cover or not to cover. 

Identifying Political Slant

In most of your classes, your professors will expect you to use news sources that have a moderate/centrist slant. Why? Because these sources aim to be as bi-partisan as possible. Because these sources are not driven by partisan slant demands, they tend to have higher quality reports or are the sources proving the original reports that other news sources pick up. However, there will be times when your professors want two or more sources with opposing views. In these case, you will want to pick a liberal and conservative source with the highest level of quality that you can find. To meet your professors requirements in both cases you have to do two things: 1) put aside your own bias and preferred slant in order to select news sources objectively, and 2) you have to learn how to evaluate news sources for their bias and slant and identify where they fall on the political scale. Both require work and time to perfect.  

Understanding where news sources fall on the political scale can be difficult. It requires critical and objective analysis of the language bias of news sources across the scale. It also requires typical evaluation methods that you use when evaluating research articles for their currency, reliability, authority, and purpose or point of view. Librarian refer to the ability to evaluate news and similar sources as media literacy, and it is a part of a greater ability called information literacy.

Readings

  • To help improve your media literacy skill, I created this library guide . (Links to an external site.) This guide can also help you identify fake news and click bait, and provide resources to help you fact check. Visit the guide and visit the page called "Home," "Media and Information Fluency," "Fake News," and "Fact Checking," 

In addition to your own media literacy skills, there is a helpful tool that you can use to help guide you in the right direction to finding appropriate news sources. It's called the Media Bias Chart and you have probably seen images of it or previous versions before.

The Media Bias Chart

The chart is a compilation of research by Vanessa Otero and her team at Ad Fontes Media and is similar to Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro research. 

The image below is the most recent version of the The Media Bias Chart by Ad Fontes Media. It presents a graph of where news outlets fall on a horizontal axis of political bias as well as on a vertical axis of their overall source reliability. The majority of the news sources form an inverted V with low quality left leaning source on the left, low quality conservative sources on the right. High quality, centrist source form the apex of the inverted V. This image is used with permission from the author. A PDF copy of the use license is available in the citation.

This image is The Media Bias Chart by Ad Fontes Media. It presents a graph of where news outlets fall a horizontal axis of political bias as well as on a vertical axis of their overall source reliability.

Ad Fontes Media. 2019. The Media Bias Chart. Chart, version 5.   Download MBC 5.0 Standard License.pdf

Ad Fontes Media is also beta testing an interactive version of the chart that researchers and students can use to isolate a media source on the chart to better view where is falls on the horizontal political scale but also on the vertical quality-hierarchy. And we are going to play with it for your learning activity for this module.

Optional Learning Activity

Use the steps below to learn how to use the Media Bias Chart tool. It's tool as well as the methods you performed in the last assignment will help you distinguish news polarity. At the end, you will be asked from critical thinking questions that you should upload answers to to receive credit for completing the activity.

  1. Open a new tab and go to https://www.adfontesmedia.com/?v=402f03a963ba (Links to an external site.).
  2. Click on the "Interactive Chart" Tab. 

Image shows home page of Media Bias Chart. An arrow points to the tab "Interactive Chart" and has directions to "click here."

  1. You will notice that at the top of the chart there is statement of directions:

To see the interactive feature, click on the names of the news sources listed alphabetically at the bottom of the chart.

That will show you where individual articles were rated for each news source.

To go back to the view of all sources, or to see alternate views, click on the buttons on the lower right side of the chart.

As an example, I am going to show you the BBC. 

Image shows how to use the chart by showing BBC as an example. Directions to "Scroll to the bottom chart to select a news sources. The source will then be isolated on the chart and you can determine its rank based on the scores of bias and reliability." On the chart the BBC source is highlighted with arrows marking its points on both the horizontal and vertical scale.

  1. Using the key on the right of the graph, I can see that it falls within the "most reliable for news 'green box and the yellow box' reliable for news but high in analysis/opinion content." This tells me that I can find both types of news coverage from the BBC. 

Image of color key.

I can also see that it falls just left of the middle of the graph, with a bias score between -6.00 and 0. At the bottom of the chart, there is statement about the score meanings: "[b]ias scores for articles and shows are on a scale of -42 to + 42, with higher negative scores being more left, higher positive scores being more right, and scores closer to zero being the most neutral and/or balanced." Based on what we learned at the beginning of the module, the BBC is a moderate/centrist news source that aims to be bipartisan.  

If I look at the left side of the graph, I can see the quality of the news source. The BBC is in between the "complex analysis" and "fact reporting" at about with a score of about 47.00 for "more reliable."  Again,  reviewing the score statement: "[r]eliability scores for articles and shows are on a scale of 0-64. Scores above 24 are generally acceptable; scores above 32 are generally good." 

Using this tool, I expect to find bipartisan, high quality news that should reinforce my own media literacy evaluation skills. 

  1. Locate the filter options at the bottom right of the chart.Image shows filter and source filters.
  2. Next, locate the Source Zoom function (use above image as reference). This view shows you all of the news with a certain slant. Box 1 shows sources with scores that are "most reliable for news" and centrist,  bipartisan. Box  2 shows liberal slanting news in the yellow, orange, and red score categories. Box 3 shows conservative slanting news in the yellow, orange, and red score categorizes. This feature can be used to help you select news sources that meet your professors requirements for bipartisan news or opposing views from liberal and conservative sources. When using this feature for apposing view points, try to select news  in the yellow box as they will have higher reliability scores. 

Critical Thinking Questions

On a sheet of paper consider the following questions:

  • Try to locate your preferred news source using the Media Bias Tool. Find where it falls on the horizontal scale and vertical scale.  Find what color group is belongs to.
    • What is the score and color of your preferred news source?
    • What does this indicate about the political slant of the source and it's polarity?
    • Are you surprised? Why or why not?
  • Think about the last article that you read from this source or find a new article. Using the methods learned in the last assignment, consider how biased language is shown by the journalist(s).
    • What further implications are made about the news source's slant and polarity by this consideration?
    • With this understanding, would you consider this news source to be biased or objective? Why?
References