PROPAGANDA-BASED CLASSIFICATION OF ARABIC NEWSPAPERS

Abstract

In this project, we explore the factuality of reporting and the bias of Arabic news media. We use a quantitative measure of political leaning and bias of a set of the most popular newspapers in the Middle East and North Africa. Previous studies have focused on classifying the news based on a single factor, for example, fake/true news. In this project, we analyze and characterize most of the well-known Arabic newspapers based on multiple factors of political polarization such as Islamist, liberal, pro-government, independent, … etc. The labels that are assigned to each newspaper have been collected from three reliable sources, namely; (i) Media Bias/Fact Check (MB/FC); (ii) Wikipedia (Arabic); and (iii) Wikipedia English. The labels from the three sources are aggregated to get a reliable and accurate classification of the Arabic newspapers. Our findings will be used to build a media bias tool that allows the user to get the political polarization of any given Arabic newspaper.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Humanities and Social Science