Newspaper Favorites? A Comparative Assessment of Political Parallelism Across Two Decades

Newspapers in most West European countries have historically had strong ties to specific political parties. While formal bonds have vanished, parallelism in news content might still remain; for instance, in a tendency to report more often and more favorably on parties that align with the political leaning of a newspaper. In this article, we ask whether political parallelism exists in newspapers today, and whether or not it has decreased over the last two decades. These questions are answered using a dataset of 5.4 million newspaper articles from three countries (Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) over 20 years, annotated with the presence of political parties, and the sentiment of party news, at the sentence level. Findings suggest that newspapers pay more attention to the mainstream party with which they share political leaning, but that this pattern of parallelism has weakened over time.