Identifying media bias with AI
Russian news coverage of the death of Alexei Navalny
Using our AI-powered narrative tracking at AskNews, we took a closer look at the volume and timing of news reports surrounding the death of Alexei Navalny. Our analysis peers into Russia’s selective reporting to suggest that Russia is experiencing censorship regarding reporting on this topic. If you want to dig into the analysis, we share the data and code in a Google Colab notebook, linked at the end of the blog post. Let’s start simple and look at the Russian coverage timeline:
The story about Navalny’s death broke on Feb. 16 and we have been tracking its development since, with updates every 4 hours. Between Feb. 16 and Feb. 20, we identified 1,165 articles, from 81 different countries, that reported on this story. The two top reporting countries were the U.S. and France, with 325 and 84 articles, respectively. Russia came in sixth place with 52 articles.
However, these are absolute numbers that do not take into account that the countries produce news at different rates. Adjusting for the total amount of news coming from each country showed that Russia covered this topic less than both France and the U.S.: 0.14% of all Russian news in our AskNews database was spent on Navalny, compared to 0.53% of French news and 0.29% of U.S. news. On aggregate, France devoted almost 4 times the relative volume of news to Navalny’s death compared to Russian news outlets.
The graph below shows how much of Russian, French, and U.S. news coverage was spent on the narrative about Alexei Navalny’s death in Russian prison.
We aggregated all data for each country to determine if they derive from similar statistical distributions. Our statistical tests determined that, while Russian coverage picked up during Feb. 20, they were still significantly behind on their reporting on Navalny’s death compared to the U.S. and France (check out the Google Colab at the end if you want details about the analysis).
As a grounding comparison, we can look at the news coverage of the ongoing Russo-Ukraine conflict:
It is clear that Russian news outlets published regular reports on their war against Ukraine. The comparison with French coverage (0.67% compared to 0.74% for Russia) is potentially skewed during this time period as France entered a security agreement with Ukraine on Feb. 16 that, of course, bolstered French reporting on the topic. However, the contrast to the 0.16% U.S. news coverage highlights the intense Russian coverage of their conflict with Ukraine compared to that of the death of Navalny.
Another grounding comparison is the coverage of U.S. ex-president Donald Trump’s release of the “Never Surrender High-Tops” shoes:
Here it appears as if Russia shared as big of an interest as the U.S., with percentage coverage being very similar between the countries.
In fact, it is interesting to point out that the Russian coverage of Trump’s new shoes was at an equal volume as their coverage of Navalny’s death.
Conclusion: Narrative tracking with AskNews helped us elucidate the bias in the Russian media surrounding the death of the opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. In particular, our narrative tracker pin-pointed the timing and magnitude of Russian reporting, shedding light on the selective reporting of the Russian news outlets.
If you want to explore this data further, we have made it available in a Google Colab notebook here.
Note: Differences in news coverage were asserted using a Bonferroni Mann-Whitney U-test; ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001.
