Evaluating the China Bias of Taiwanese Newspapers

• In Event: Exploring Political Dynamics in Taiwan: Finance, Media, and Democratic Support

Abstract

Media are considered to be more biased and less trustworthy than ever in many democratic countries. However, evaluating media bias is not an easy task. In particular, perceived bias can prevail even when there is no substantive difference in media reporting. Despite this difficulty, a thorough understanding of the levels of media bias is essential to study many important issues in political communication, such as selective exposure and the media persuasion effect. To better understand the media landscape in Taiwan, this paper examines the media bias of the three most prominent newspapers in Taiwan: the China Times, the Liberty Times, and the United Daily. We focus on their China bias because Taiwan’s future relationship with China is the most important political divide among Taiwanese voters, and conventional wisdom also suggests that the newspapers exhibit their biases along this dimension. We attempt to rank the newspapers’ levels of China bias using various approaches. Results from two independent surveys demonstrate that the public perception of their levels of bias is consistent with expert opinions and conventional wisdom: the Liberty Times is the least favorable to China, while the China Times and the United Daily are perceived as extremely and moderately pro-China, respectively. On the other hand, results from computational text analysis and manual coding of their reports show a clear divide between the Liberty Times and the other two but, interestingly, no significant difference in the coverage of the China Times and the United Daily.

Authors

• Greg Chih-Hsin Sheen, Academia Sinica

• Leonid Peisakhin, New York University - Abu Dhabi

• Ruilin Lai, Washington University in St. Louis