Katz Colloquium: Duncan Watts

Introducing the Media Bias Detector

About the Talk:

Mainstream news organizations shape public perception not only directly through the articles they publish but also through the choices they make about which topics to cover (or ignore) and how to frame the issues they do decide to cover. However, measuring these subtle forms of media bias at scale remains a challenge. In this talk I introduce the Media Bias Detector (MBD), a large, ongoing (from January 1, 2024 to present) collaborative effort to enable systematic study of selection and framing bias in news coverage. The MBD integrates large language models (LLMs) with scalable, near-real-time news scraping to extract structured annotations--including political lean, tone, topics, article type, and major events--across hundreds of articles per day. We quantify these dimensions of coverage at multiple levels --- the sentence level, the article level, and the publisher level --- expanding the ways in which researchers can analyze media bias in the modern news landscape. In addition to a curated dataset, we also release an interactive web platform for convenient exploration of these data. Together, these contributions establish a reusable methodology for studying media bias at scale, providing empirical resources for future research. Leveraging the breadth of the corpus over time and across publishers, we also present some examples (focused on the 150,000+ articles examined in 2024) that illustrate how this novel data set can reveal insightful patterns in news coverage and bias, supporting academic research and real-world efforts to improve media accountability.

About the Speaker: 

Duncan Watts is the Stevens University Professor and 23rd Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds faculty appointments in the Department of Computer and Information Science, The Annenberg School of Communications, and the Operations, Information, and Decisions Department in the Wharton School. He holds a BSc in physics from the University of New South Wales and a PhD in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University. Prior to joining Penn in 2019, Watts was Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, from 2000-2007, a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, from 2007-2012, and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, from 2012-2019. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an inaugural fellow of the Network Science Society. He is currently serving as the founding president of the International Society for Computational Social Science.