I Don't Want You to Be My President! Incivility and Media Bias During the Presidential Election in Chile
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Date
2020
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SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
Abstract
This study observes two relevant issues in today's media ecosystem: incivility in online news comments and media bias during election periods. By analyzing 84 stories and 4670 comments published during the 2017 presidential election in Chile, we observed the extent to which news commenters addressed political figures using uncivil discourse, and the extent to which incivility and media bias were related in comments discussing the election. Results indicate incivility in comment sections of Chilean news outlets is higher than that found in the Global North, and the levels of uncivil speech are even higher when the conversation mentions female politicians, especially former president Michelle Bachelet. We also found a relationship between media bias and user bias-stories positively biased toward current president Sebastian Pinera were associated with more positive comments about him. Implications and future research are discussed.
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Keywords
incivility, news comments, presidential elections, media bias, content analysis, Chile