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News media is expected to uphold unbiased reporting. Yet they may still affect public opinion by selectively including or omitting events that support or contradict their ideological positions. Prior work in NLP has only studied media bias via linguistic style and word usage. In this paper, we study to which degree media balances news reporting and affects consumers through event inclusion or omission. We first introduce the task of detecting both partisan and counter- partisan events: events that support or oppose the author’s political ideology. To conduct our study, we annotate a high-quality dataset, PAC, containing 8 , 511 (counter-)partisan event annotations in 304 news articles from ideologically diverse media outlets. We benchmark PAC to highlight the challenges of this task. Our findings highlight both the ways in which the news subtly shapes opinion and the need for large language models that better understand events within a broader context. Our dataset can be found at https://github.com/ launchnlp/Partisan-Event-Dataset.
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This content will become publicly available on May 4, 2026
Bike Frames: Understanding the Implicit Portrayal of Cyclists in the News
Increasing cycling for transportation or recreation can boost health and reduce the environmental impacts of vehicles. However, news agencies' ideologies and reporting styles often influence public perception of cycling. For example, if news agencies overly report cycling accidents, it may make people perceive cyclists as "dangerous," reducing the number of cyclists who opt to cycle. Additionally, a decline in cycling can result in less government funding for safe infrastructure. In this paper, we develop a method for detecting the perceived perception of cyclists within news headlines. We introduce a new dataset called ``Bike Frames'' to accomplish this. The dataset consists of 31,480 news headlines and 1,500 annotations. Our focus is on analyzing 11,385 headlines from the United States. We also introduce the BikeFrame Chain-of-Code framework to predict cyclist perception, identify accident-related headlines, and determine fault. This framework uses pseudocode for precise logic and integrates news agency bias analysis for improved predictions over traditional chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models. Our method substantially outperforms other methods, and most importantly, we find that incorporating news bias information substantially impacts performance, improving the average F1 from .739 to .815. Finally, we perform a comprehensive case study on US-based news headlines, finding reporting differences between news agencies and cycling-specific websites as well as differences in reporting depending on the gender of cyclists. WARNING: This paper contains descriptions of accidents and death.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2145357
- PAR ID:
- 10587590
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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