Comments on: Crowdsourcing to find media bias: Hillary vs. Obama

By: Panos Ipeirotis

Panos Ipeirotis — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 21:31:12 +0000

Correct, the study measures correctly the bias of each outlet. The only issue is where to put the “0″ at the y-axis that measures “favorability” for Obama.

By: brendano

brendano — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:53:37 +0000

Yes, I’d expect the Turker population to have a bias compared to a more representative population. But I think the news source comparison still holds, because the judgments were blind and done by the same annotator population.

By: Panos Ipeirotis

Panos Ipeirotis — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:23:24 +0000

Following John’s comment above: there may be a hidden bias in using Mechanical Turk for this sentiment analysis. The demographics of the Turkers (young, college educated) seems to fit better the profile of the Obama fans. So they everything else being equal, I expect the articles to be marked as pro-Obama.

I do not question the predictive power of the news articles, though. I have done it much larger scale, and indeed it works, even with automatic sentiment analysis techniques. (For more details, look at http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2007/12/prediction-markets-are-not-efficient.html)

By: john

john — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 06:16:45 +0000

It is a fact that Obama is more popular in the younger demographic while Hillary has the edge in the older demographic. Also Obama is more popular among university educated/white collar workers, while Hillary is more popular in the working class. Both of the Obama lending factors are present on DIGG — it skews young and it skews towards college students / future white collar technology professionals. I suggest finding working class outlets that are frequented by older American to see a similar pro-Clinton stance.

By: tess

tess — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:19:14 +0000

why is obama the positive and hillary the negative on your bar graph? hrm.