Keyword – online media

Kiss, László:

From media bias to parallel realities

Discourses on the state of public education on two Hungarian news sites

Media bias is typically used in the literature in three senses: coverage bias, gatekeeping bias, and statement bias. The analysis of the corpus of articles reporting on teachers’ demonstrations and published on the news sites origo.hu and telex.hu suggests that media bias is a particularly salient problem in Hungary. In addition to offering highly different narratives on the events reported, the two news sites evince a high degree of news selectivity with highly different news frames. This paper argues that the two news sites representing different political stances create two completely separate “information universes,” with reports and interpretations depicting reality from completely different perspectives.

Keywords: media bias, online media, protest, teachers, text analysis