polidex

An experimental tool, use with caution.

How much political bias is there in NZ media?

polidex aims to answer this question.

Political bias in the media can be subtle and sometimes un-intentional.
Polidex measures relative positive and negative sentiment in NZ media political reporting.

 View results    How it works

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Positive bias
Negative bias

How does polidex work?

Here is a step-by-step breakdown of the process.

  1. Fetch articles from NZ news sites where possible every hour.
  2. Determine if the article is political via keyword match.
  3. Determine if this article is referencing a party in particular via keyword match. A minimum mention threshold of 4 (with a bonus point awarded to mentions in title) is applied narrow down results.
  4. Remove any quoted sentences - these are most likely quotes from the mentioned party so we dont want this to impact on sentiment.
  5. Run sentiment analysis on the article to assign it a value on a scale between -10 and 10.
  6. Average out the sentiment between each news source and display a relatively adjusted result.

articles have been polidexed since July 14, 2024 (the last 4 months). View them

Sometimes articles might be flagged incorrectly - as non-policatal, political, or the wrong party. We aim to improve this over time. Values are relative so they should automatically adjust for factually negative or positive news.

Parties must be mentioned atleast 4 times before being polidexed.

Currently polidexing . Polidex relies on RSS feeds and scraping so not all sites are polidexible.

Polidex uses a VADER based PHP Sentiment Analyzer to perform its sentiment calculations.

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