TY - JOUR

T1 - My EU = Your EU?

T2 - Differences in the Perception of European Issues across Geographic Regions

AU - Rudra, Koustav

AU - Backfried, Gerhard

AU - Shaltev, Miroslav

AU - Niederee, Claudia

AU - Elejalde, Erick

N1 - Funding Information: Funding for this project was in part provided by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 832921 (MIRROR)

PY - 2021/12/1

Y1 - 2021/12/1

N2 - Our perception of the situation in a country or a region is strongly influenced by the reflection of this situation in mass and social media channels. This effect is even more pronounced for geographically and culturally distant regions, for which no firsthand experience is available. To avoid information overload, news outlets typically filter the available news from foreign countries based on the expected interest of the target audiences. Such filtering imposes an inherent bias in the reporting and can create a distorted perception of a region among the consumers of news of other regions. This might lead to misunderstandings between countries and unsubstantiated political and individual decisions (e.g., in the context of migration). In this article, we systematically analyze the bias created in news reports. We consider Europe, or more precisely the European Union (EU) as our zone of concern, and examine its image in the media (news outlets) of other regions, Europe(NON-EU), Africa, Asia, Middle-East, America, and Oceania. An analysis of the year 2018 (January-December 2018) of news published in those regions reveals marked differences in the editorial policies and presented narrative when dealing with EU-related news. We observe a significant variation in the sentiment polarity of the reported EU-related stories between the European and other regional news outlets. We further analyze the polarity variation among different subregions of large geographical areas, such as Africa, Asia, and America. We observe a contrasting difference in their editorial policies. This trend also holds for news related to different topics, such as politics, business, economy, health, and international relation.

AB - Our perception of the situation in a country or a region is strongly influenced by the reflection of this situation in mass and social media channels. This effect is even more pronounced for geographically and culturally distant regions, for which no firsthand experience is available. To avoid information overload, news outlets typically filter the available news from foreign countries based on the expected interest of the target audiences. Such filtering imposes an inherent bias in the reporting and can create a distorted perception of a region among the consumers of news of other regions. This might lead to misunderstandings between countries and unsubstantiated political and individual decisions (e.g., in the context of migration). In this article, we systematically analyze the bias created in news reports. We consider Europe, or more precisely the European Union (EU) as our zone of concern, and examine its image in the media (news outlets) of other regions, Europe(NON-EU), Africa, Asia, Middle-East, America, and Oceania. An analysis of the year 2018 (January-December 2018) of news published in those regions reveals marked differences in the editorial policies and presented narrative when dealing with EU-related news. We observe a significant variation in the sentiment polarity of the reported EU-related stories between the European and other regional news outlets. We further analyze the polarity variation among different subregions of large geographical areas, such as Africa, Asia, and America. We observe a contrasting difference in their editorial policies. This trend also holds for news related to different topics, such as politics, business, economy, health, and international relation.

KW - European Union (EU)

KW - media bias

KW - news article

KW - perception

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85107333100&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1109/TCSS.2021.3082422

DO - 10.1109/TCSS.2021.3082422

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85107333100

VL - 8

SP - 1475

EP - 1488

JO - IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems

JF - IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems

IS - 6

ER -