NSlant: Understanding Media Slants and Their Impact in the Digital Age

In today’s digital era, the Internet has become the main source of news for the masses. Although it offers unprecedented access to an enormous amount of information, such digital abundance also brings challenges for transparency and increases the risk of ‘news slants’. The NSlant project, therefore, addresses the key need to identify and understand the subtle (often unconscious) biases that may be present in media texts. This project is a joint effort of the Visegrad Group.

The importance of this project stems from the significant influence of news content on society and politics. News and press play a key role in informing citizens about state affairs, and the accuracy and objectivity of news are paramount. However, evaluating media slants -how favourable or unfavourable the media reports are on a person, group, or organisation – has long been a complex problem for research and quantitative assessment. Mainly because it is often a sensitive and inherently subjective matter, as such media biases affect the selection of events, the perspectives adopted in reporting, and most importantly, the readers of news. The project examines media slants and their various aspects, exploring concepts, threats, and methods to detect such biases. It also examines the effects of media subjectivity in specific contexts or situations, such as media coverage of various corruption scandals or topics related to the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 epidemic in various media across the V4 countries. 

The project is based on the assumption that media bias manifests not only in the content of the news itself but also in what type of information is emphasised, how events are framed, and what information is omitted, whether intentionally or not. In the project, our responsibility is to cover the technical side related to the field of natural language processing for the Slovak language. By implementing and applying various methodologies, such as text analysis and examining media narratives using artificial intelligence, we strive to provide insights into the fault lines within societies, the influence of economic interests on information flow, and the overall state of democracy within the states of the Visegrad Group.