It would be challenging to define "articles that a news organization should cover but isn't" though. Like there's trillions of things that happen every day, where's the lower bound on "news worthy" and how do you not bias that lower bound to ignore things that some other party would consider significant?

You could do it in relation to other news outlets. That won't give you absolute bias, but you could say something like "CNN is much less likely to report about X topics than Fox." It would be interesting as well to add in other factors - i.e. how often do certain outlets report about the wars in the middle east when the president is republican vs democrat?

I would go farther and make it relative to clusters of people on, say, Twitter. If an outlet is concerned with a lot of things that the progressive cluster of Twitter users is talking about (more so than many other outlets), that’s a strong indicator that the media outlet (and other outlets in its media cluster) is also progressive.

I'll just throw out a comment (even though this is mostly a thought experiment) that doing any type of twitter analysis is either nearly impossible (in the scraping case) or prohibitively expensive (e.g. using their API). They've really shut off access to third parties in the last few years. (Just thought I'd mention it since the parent post continues this pre-2015-ish idea that still floats around that using twitter for projects could be a thing.)

Fair enough, yes, Twitter was intended to be an example of a mine-able medium where people express political opinions, but to your point mining Twitter data may be more difficult than I imagined.

How often certain outlets report about the wars in the middle east fluctuates massively on the actual wars, though.

But you would still expect them to fluctuate together. How the different news agencies ramp up and down coverage in response to the same events is what's interesting.

Ah, fair enough - thought you meant over time.

Really? You just take the set of stories across N news outlets and then compare to the set of stories in each one outlet.

Sure. It's just that if the goal really is to identify which stories aren't covered by news then if you only look at what news covers to determine that, you'll miss some of the bigger 'coordinated silences'. Weinstein's comment about how weird it is that no journalist ever brings up some really obvious questions about Epstein comes to mind. Or how little press there was about his brothers telomere story. From one perspective the reason for the silence is because it's not worth covering by the news, but from another perspective it's biased silence.

Or report by saying only half the truth, without showing the other side's story at all. It makes it so much easier to adapt the language to sound neutral and educated. I think this is a big part of why the US is so divided right now, you get mostly half truths and no coherent view from the other side that it makes you think "the others" are completely insane.

Yes. There are research dollars for studies to "use AI to do a meaningless study on topics that are done better in other ways." Hence professors obligingly churn them out and journalists report them.

What's even funnier is, once you speak two languages, to compare coverage of the same news on the same network in two different languages (so aimed at different demographics).