ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the quality of political fact-checking to determine the extent of any political bias. Measuring bias in news coverage is a difficult task. Unlike more concrete concepts bias is more abstract and more challenging to measure. Attempts to measure bias must also account for the relative nature of the concept. Ideally, scholars could determine the bias of news stories, but such a conclusion is challenging since no agreed upon standards exist to distinguish between neutrality and bias. Several potential linguistic markers of bias in the media exist, including the number of positive and negative terms in the text and the level of integrative complexity of the content. The frequency of positive and negative terms could serve as a sign of bias in the news, as several previous studies of newspaper coverage measured the frequency of positive and negative terms to document an imbalance in the presentation of content on a wide variety of topics.
