2. Media bias outside of politics: A study on the reporting of GM foods in Europe
2.9 Content Analysis of newspaper coverage on GM foods in Europe
According to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, the number of newspaper titles worldwide increased by 200 in 2010, to 14,853, but the rate of increase is slowing due to consolidation in many markets as publishers close unprofitable titles and the number of free newspaper titles decreases worldwide.
The focus in this research is on European newspapers. ENPA is an international non-profit association, advocating the interests of publishers of newspapers and news media in Europe.
This organization explains that Europe is home to a diverse range of newspapers and news media at national, regional and local levels. European publishing houses offer a broad menu of professional news, information and entertainment to citizens every day. In doing so, the news media sector plays a unique role in democracy in Europe, stimulating informed debate and promoting engaged citizenship.
ENPA has 32 member associations from the EU Members States, as well as Norway, Switzerland and Serbia. Together, its membership represents some 5,200 national, regional and local newspaper titles, published across Europe. More than 150 million print newspapers are sold and read by over 300 million Europeans every day, in addition to the millions of readers of newspapers and news media in digital formats. The newspaper and news media publishing sector generated total revenues of EUR 36 billion in 2011. The majority of publishing houses in the news media sector in Europe are SMEs that provide jobs in local communities.
The study analysed the contents related to news coverage on GM foods in selected European newspapers over a period of 6 years (from 1st January 2005 to 31st December
47 2010). Two independent reviewers systematically analysed articles and editorials and noted possible bias by evaluating the overall article/editorial as positively-biased, neutral/don’t know or negatively-biased. These reviewers were not advised of the true nature of the project (examination of possible bias). While they had a scientific background, they had no specific knowledge of the trends in GM foods.
The task was carried out in 3 stages as follows:
Stage 1: Selecting the representative countries and newspapers. It was decided to examine newspapers from different countries across Europe. Newspapers were selected on the basis of their circulation numbers in each country in order to obtain maximum representation in each country.1516 Further, the countries selected include fully-developed countries such as France, UK and Germany as well as developing countries such as Romania and Estonia.
While circulation was the main criterion used, some consideration was given to include as many countries as possible within the sample.
Two sports newspapers (L’Equipe from France and AS from Spain), which were originally selected based on their high circulation, were later eliminated from the list based on their unique focus on sports. In addition, 4 newspapers from India, 1 from Croatia and 3 from Russia were selected as ‘control’ newspapers. Thus a total of 46 publications from 17 countries were retained for evaluation.
Stage 2: The next stage involved identifying articles and editorials concerning genetically modified foods between the period 2005 and 2010 (6 years). 2005 was identified as the base year since Eurobarometer data (Table 2.1) indicated that European public opinion concerning GM foods may have more or less stabilized by 2005, thus the media decision to bias or not may be considered as more proactive. A list of 'search' words was finalised based on Fitzgerald et al. (2002). Thus, the chosen key words were:
GMO
15 http://www.4imn.com/topEurope/
16http://www.publicitas.com/fileadmin/uploads/switzerland/Images/Vertretungsliste_Newspaper_20100 118.pdf
48
Genetically Modified Food
Genetically Engineered Food
Genet* Modi* Foods
Biotech food
Gene Tech food
In order to be able to search in the local language publications in Continental Europe, the above terms were first translated into all the relevant languages.
Stage 3: Each issue of the selected newspapers was searched using the above key words in the respective languages and each identified article was named using a specific coding system so that their source could be easily identified at a later stage.
Articles, if not already in English, were translated into English using the Google translation software. While the quality of the translations was far from being perfect, several factors were in favour of adopting this procedure. First of all, the objective of the project is to identify the possible bias based on the different statements in the article, for which even a reasonable quality of translation was sufficient. European languages are increasingly better translated by this software. Further, when a particular article was felt as of not acceptable quality for this classification even by one of the evaluators, the same article was removed from the analysis. Hence the choice of the Google ‘translation software’ was found to be acceptable in spite of the inherent problem with the quality of the translation. Examples of the original and translated articles with negative content, positive content and neutral content are given in Appendix 2.1.
Table 2.3 provides the number of articles on GM foods identified in 46 newspapers across the 17 countries.
49 Table 2.3. No. of GM-Foods Articles Identified by Newspaper
Country Newspaper Total no. of articles
Austria Der Standard 259
Austria Diepresse 77
Croatia Vecernji list 7*
Estonia Postimees 66
France Le Figaro 254**
France Le Monde 283**
France Le Monde Diplomatique 17*
France Le Parisien 383
France Libération 306
Germany Bild 123
Germany Die Welt 144
Germany Die Zeit 105
Germany Rheinische Post 51
Germany Süddeutsche Zeitung 125
India Hindustan Times 47
India The Hindu 137
India The Telegraph 33
India The Times Of India 52
Ireland The Irish Independent 67
Italy Corriere della Sera 98
Italy Il Sole 24 Ore 49
Italy La Repubblica 108
Italy La Stampa 56
Netherland De Telegraaf 9
Norway Verdens Gang 5
Poland Gazeta Wyborcza 61**
Romania Adevarul 77
Russia Kommersant 41
Russia Rossiyskaya Gazeta 67
Russia Pravda 31
Sweden Dagens Nyheter 33
Sweden Expressen 13
Sweden Svenska Dagbladet 65
Switzerland Neue Zürcher Zeitung 19
UK The Daily Mail 54
Notes: “ Only 2009 & 2010 available. ** Excluding locked articles
50 The coding methodology of White (1998), which was later used by Fitzgerald et al. (2002), was based on identifying the underlying themes of the articles and thus classifying them as positive, negative or neutral; for example, the category ‘positive' contained articles which tended to refer to 'cutting-edge' technology for the common good and did not usually raise issues of ethics or long-term efficacy. In this research, the themes were developed by the evaluators during the evaluation of the first 200 articles, and these were used as a basis by the evaluators for further scoring of the articles as positive, negative or neutral. But it is difficult to separate the evaluation based on these ‘themes’ and that based on the final
‘sentiment’ of the evaluator since they are likely to happen simultaneously in the minds of the evaluators as they read the articles.
The details of the coding system used are provided in Appendix 2.2.
The method used in grading the articles for possible bias is shown in Appendix 2.3.
The role of the newspapers in defining and controlling the type of bias can be seen from the following example: The title of an article in The Hindu dated 24.2.2008 reads Bt brinjal trials have GEAC approval: TNAU. This title obtained a ‘positive’ score from the evaluator.
However, the article contained both positive news (government approval for the trial and with university registrar claiming that it will help feed millions of people) and negative news (health hazard claim by activists), and the evaluator scored it as a ‘neutral’ content article. This article is shown at the end of Appendix 2.1 as item no.5.
As explained earlier, the ‘themes’ of the articles were identified and listed by the two evaluators for the first 200 articles, which were then assembled as 15 different themes.
These themes are listed in Table 2.4.
51 Table 2.4. List of Themes Identified
Theme Code
Health 1
Environmental Changes/ nature/threats 2
GM Ban/GM-free/ Anti GMO 3
Labelling 4
Food safety/risk (on food) 5
Destruction of fields/protest 6
Certification/Testing for GM/ Denial/Rejection 7 Legislation/imprisoned/fined/illegal/safeguard
clause
8
Patent/ Trials 9
Scientific development 10
Global hunger/ Food crisis 11
GM Approval/ Pending/GM ban lifted 12
GM Prevalence/ No side effects/co-existence 13
Nourishment 14
Others 15
While the theme of an article identifies the subject of the article and informs the reader what the article is trying to communicate (i.e., health issues, environmental concerns, scientific advancement, etc.), study evaluators did not assign values blindly to articles based on a predetermined understanding of what constituted positive, negative, and neutral themes. For example, an article addressing scientific advancement may be defined as a positive theme, while health or environmental issues related to GM technology may be seen as negative. But the mere identification of an article’s theme does not necessarily suggest a bias. An article that decries ‘scientific advancement’ (positive theme) will be scored as ‘negatively biased’.
Hence, only after the evaluators read the articles did they assign positive, negative, or neutral scores to each article based on a subjective interpretation of the way the writer of the article developed the theme, and thus these two iterative steps are difficult to be separated.
As explained above, two types of bias in an article were observed by the evaluators: 1) the theme (negative subjects such as health, etc., positive subjects such as world famine, etc.
52 and neutral subjects such as legislation) and 2) the writer can also introduce the bias through the tone and words used in the article. Initially, the 2 evaluators were asked to distinguish between these two types of biases. In spite of many attempts, they were unable to distinguish clearly between the two types of biases. Hence, it was decided that after reading an article, if they are left with a negative feeling about GM foods, they will classify the article as one with a negative bias which of course was essentially based on the theme. Similar logic was applied for identifying positive and neutral bias. Thus, the score obtained for each article is the combined effect of both facets of the bias – i.e. the theme and tone/content.
According to Macnamara (2003), a rigorous ‘scientific’ approach to media content analysis to gain maximum reliability requires that two or more coders are used and Cohen’s kappa is indicated as one of the accepted indices to test intercoder reliability. Further, the reliability sub-sample should probably never be smaller than 50 and should rarely need to be larger than about 300 (Neuendorf (2002)).
The 'content' scores (cscore) of one of the two evaluators and my scores were first compared for the 99 articles found in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera (99 articles) using Stata, and the Cohen’s kappa value was as follows:
Similarly, the content comparison scores for the two independent evaluators for the same 99 articles from Corriere della Sera were as follows:
64.29% 39.23% 0.4123 0.0709 5.82 0.0000 Agreement Agreement Kappa Std. Err. Z Prob>Z Expected
. kap content3 content2
62.24% 35.16% 0.4177 0.0660 6.33 0.0000 Agreement Agreement Kappa Std. Err. Z Prob>Z Expected
. kap content2 content1
53 The kappa score when the scores on the title evaluation (tscore) between the two evaluators were compared was as follows:
The criteria used, themes identified and other issues were then re-discussed amongst the evaluators.
In order to ensure that the two evaluators apply similar criteria while evaluating, another kappa value was derived after the two evaluators had completed evaluating an additional 311 articles (Telegraph (UK) and Le Figaro (France)).
Since the initial analysis on the scores of the two evaluators clearly showed that their agreement on the scores was not by chance (probability of that being nearly zero), the evaluation was continued by dividing the remaining articles across the two evaluators.
Thus a total of 3991 articles across 46 newspapers in 17 countries were evaluated for the title and content by the two independent evaluators. Access for certain newspapers was not available for certain periods, while in a few others, archives of newspapers were not maintained for all the required years. The two West European countries of Norway and Switzerland were considered along with the 12 other European Union countries as being
‘European’ while Croatia, Russia and India were used as the control countries. This was done since both Norway and Switzerland have most of their social, legal and cultural institutions aligned with those of the countries of the European Union, while Croatia and Russia have a very different institutional make-up as compared to the EU. It is to be noted that Croatia is now a part of the European Union (since 2013) but was not during the research period of 2005 - 2010.
70.41% 34.21% 0.5502 0.0709 7.76 0.0000 Agreement Agreement Kappa Std. Err. Z Prob>Z Expected
. kap title2 title1
74.19% 54.42% 0.4338 0.0426 10.19 0.0000 Agreement Agreement Kappa Std. Err. Z Prob>Z Expected
. kap content2 content1
54 2.10 Results
Of the total of 3991 articles, 3576 (or 90%) articles were identified in European newspapers.
Europe has been defined as countries in the European Union along with Norway and Switzerland. The remaining 415 (or 10%) articles are from newspapers originating from non-European countries (Croatia, Russia and India).
As mentioned earlier, two sets of bias scores were recorded – one after reading only the title (title score) and the second after reading the title and the entire article (content score) together. The initial scoring of the possible bias from the titles of all the articles identified in the European newspapers yielded the following scores: positive bias = 469 (13.1%), negative bias = 1421 (39.7%) and don’t know/neutral = 1686 (47.2%). However, since the translation of titles using the Google translator led to some confusion amongst the reviewers, it was decided to stop further analysis with the scores on the evaluation of bias from reading just the titles of the articles (title score or tscore). Further analysis was carried out only with the scores after reading the title and the entire article (content score or cscore).
The scoring of the possible bias from the entire article (content score or cscore) identified in the European newspapers yielded the following scores: positive bias= 666 (18.6%), negative bias= 2343 (65.5%) and don’t know/neutral= 567 (15.9%).
The number of articles by direction of bias and by year is given in Figure 2.2.
55 Figure 2.2. Number of GM-foods Articles Identified by Year
The two spikes in the number of articles in 2008 and 2010 can be explained as the large number of articles published in France in 2008 as discussions regarding the Grenelle de l’Environnement as mentioned earlier, and a relatively large number across the major countries of Germany, France and Italy in 2010. It is evident from this graph (Figure 2.2) that negative bias against GM foods was predominant in each of the 6 years.
Figure 2.3 shows the total number of articles by country (average per newspaper) and by year.
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
05 06 07 08 09 10
Negative
Neutral/don't know Positive
56 Figure 2.3. Number of GM-foods Articles per Country and Newspaper
Since the large countries have 3 to 5 large circulation newspapers (and hence included in the study), the number of articles on GM foods in these countries is higher than in the small countries, where generally one or two newspapers per country was included. Der Standard in Austria is an exception, and with 259 articles on GM foods over the 6 years; it ranks third in terms of total articles published, after 2 French newspapers.
Press Freedom as a variable affecting media bias is studied in depth in Chapter 3. However, an early indication of the variable’s impact on media bias can be seen in Figure 2.3. For example, it is interesting to note that the countries with relatively lower Press Freedom, such as France (42nd in the list, Austria (33rd), Italy (75th), Romania (87th) and the UK (29th) have a higher number of articles on GM foods per newspaper (248.8, 168.0, 77.8, 77.0 and 75.1 respectively), while countries with higher Press Freedom such as Norway (2nd), Sweden (3rd), Switzerland (9th) and Netherlands (11th) have published relatively a lower number of articles per newspaper (5.0, 31.5, 19.0 and 9.0 respectively).17 There are a few exceptions here too and there are many other factors affecting this phenomenon which are examined more in depth in Chapter 3.
17 www.freedomhouse.org
0.0 10.0 20.0 30.0 40.0 50.0 60.0 70.0 80.0 90.0
Austria Croatia Estonia France Germany India Ireland Italy Netherlands Norway Poland Romania Russia Spain Sweden Switzerland UK
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
57 Similarly, the countries with low Eurobarometer GM food acceptance scores (Table 2.1) such as France, Germany, Italy and Austria, generally have both higher number and higher negative content number of articles per newspaper.
Table 2.5 shows the total number of articles addressing the GM foods issue in the six-year period 2005 to 2010 in each country.
Table 2.5. Number of GM foods articles per country
France is clearly an outlier, and the large number of articles (at an average of 80.2 per newspaper) in 2008 is related to the strong political drama following the recommendations of the Grenelle de l’Environnement (Environmental Think-Tank) in late 2007. But, as mentioned earlier, France shows the highest number of articles on GM foods. The regular show of strength by activists, led by José Bové, has also been a reason for the large number of articles in newspapers concerning GM foods which can be witnessed by the large number of articles collected in this issue mentioning José Bové.
Table 2.6 gives the total number of articles with a negative content score in the period 2005 to 2010 for each country, while Figure 2.4 provides the same statistic but as an average per newspaper in each country.
Country 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Total
No. of newspapers
Austria 60 111 71 34 30 30 336 2
Croatia 2 5 7 1
Estonia 15 8 14 8 6 15 66 1
France 118 150 177 401 158 240 1244 5
Germany 23 34 62 84 198 147 548 5
India 18 30 22 32 49 118 269 4
Ireland 11 23 12 8 5 8 67 1
Italy 33 19 47 23 37 152 311 4
Netherlands 2 3 4 9 1
Norway 1 3 1 5 1
Poland 5 8 1 28 6 13 61 1
Romania 4 9 22 11 14 17 77 1
Russia 17 14 42 24 16 26 139 3
Spain 18 26 19 41 18 59 181 4
Sweden 23 14 23 20 13 33 126 4
Switzerland 1 3 11 4 19 1
UK 45 69 74 132 79 127 526 7
Total 390 516 590 852 645 998 3991 46
58 Table 2.6. No. of GM-foods Articles with Negative Content Score per Country
Figure 2.4. No. of GM-foods Articles with negative Content Score per Country per Newspaper
The results are quite similar to those for total articles, with France, Austria and Germany showing a higher share of negatively biased articles.
Table 2.7 provides the summary of the total number of articles split as positive, negative and neutral by country over the six-year period.
Country 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Total
No. of newspapers
Austria 40 82 55 23 19 17 236 2
Croatia 1 1 2 1
Estonia 13 7 8 4 5 10 47 1
France 87 122 145 304 115 153 926 5
Germany 11 23 36 43 135 108 356 5
Total 265 374 422 543 421 603 2628 46
0.0
Austria Croatia Estonia France Germany India Ireland Italy Netherlands Norway Poland Romania Russia Spain Sweden Switzerland UK
2005
59 Table 2.7. No. of GM-foods Articles with Score per Country
Country
Positive Content
Negative Content
Neutral Content
Total Number of articles
No. of newspapers
Austria 39 236 61 336 2
Croatia 4 2 1 7 1
Estonia 9 47 10 66 1
France 145 926 173 1244 5
Germany 96 356 96 548 5
India 57 170 42 269 4
Ireland 7 46 14 67 1
Italy 59 194 58 311 4
Netherlands 3 1 5 9 1
Norway 1 3 1 5 1
Poland 12 40 9 61 1
Romania 14 59 4 77 1
Russia 9 113 17 139 3
Spain 62 88 31 181 4
Sweden 28 86 12 126 4
Switzerland 3 9 7 19 1
UK 188 252 86 526 7
Total 736 2628 627 3991 46
Spain (34%) and the UK (36%) show a relatively higher % of positive content articles which is very much in line with the higher acceptance of GM foods by the respective consumers as can be seen in Table 2.1. Similarly, Table 2.7 shows that France (12%), Italy (19%), Germany (18%) and Austria (12%) have a lower % of positive content articles which relates well to the lower acceptance of GM foods in these countries.
60 Figure 2.5 shows the spread of the themes of the articles across the years.
Figure 2.5. GM-foods Articles by Country and Theme
1 Health
2 Environmental Changes/ Threats/ Suspend Cultivation/ Contamination/
Risk (on environment) 3 GM Ban/GM-free/ Anti GMO 4 Labelling
5 Food safety/ Risk (on food) 6 Destruction of fields/ Protest
7 Certification/Testing for GM/ Denial/ Rejection
8 Legislation/ imprisoned/ fined/ illegal/ safeguard clause 9 Patent/ Trials
10 Scientific development 11 Global hunger/ Food crisis
12 GM Approval/ Pending/ GMO Ban Lifted 13 GM Prevalence/ No side effects/ Co existence 14 Nourishment
15 Others
These themes were listed based on the ‘overall message’ that a particular article is trying to communicate. These were obtained from the scorers after the evaluation of the first 200 articles and the remaining articles were grouped under one or the other theme by the scorers. It is evident that the ‘negative’ themes outnumber the ‘positive’ or ‘neutral’ themes.
0
61 In addition, 590 articles were identified in which the term ‘Greenpeace’ was mentioned, and of these, 470 (or 79.6%) articles were scored as being negatively biased against GM foods.
2.11 Discussion
The primary result, that newspapers in Europe have biased the news on genetically-modified
The primary result, that newspapers in Europe have biased the news on genetically-modified