General Election 2016 analysis: Online news heavily skewed against Sinn Féin

AN ANALYSIS of online news output during the 2016 General Election campaign reveals a huge and blatant negative bias in the Irish media's coverage of Sinn Féin. 

Pádraig O'Mara – a contributor to Village Magazine and blogger on Medium.com – analysed 1,150 news articles published between 3 and 25 February 2016 across five media outlets: RTÉ, The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, theJournal.ie and the Irish Examiner.

Overall, headline stories showed that 31% of coverage went to Fine Gael followed by nearly 23% for Fianna Fáil. Labour received nearly 21% of headline coverage while Sinn Féin received the smallest share across all outlets at just 8.5%.

Using data analytics and Natural Language Processing, the analysis shows that Sinn Féin received more than twice as much negative coverage as other parties – with over 60% of stories about the party containing negative or condemnatory language, with less than 20% containing positive stories. 

In comparison, only 20% of stories about the Labour Party used negative language while almost 55% were positive.

The study reveals what many knew already, that the Irish Independent's output is blatantly skewed against Sinn Féin, with almost 61% of its stories speaking about the party in negative terminology. 

“Naturally, The Independent leads in negative output for Sinn Féin,” says O'Mara.

Gerry Adams described the Irish Independent's coverage of the party as “unrelenting in its bias, distortion and offensiveness for many years now”.

Meanwhile, analysis of state broadcaster RTÉ's online coverage also shows a hugely negative bias when covering the republican party. 

This seems to support claims by Sinn Féin during the campaign that the party was being treated unfairly by RTÉ.

*Read the full analysis HERE