Joshua Park,
Saint Paul Preparatory Seoul
Abstract
Media biases are often seen as neutral facts and tend to go unnoticed by the public. These biases can subtly influence how people view various social issues, leading to hasty conclusions. The negative impacts of media bias are especially apparent today, as they can fuel racial hatred and contribute to hate crimes. Readers need to recognize racial bias in articles before engaging with them, as this awareness can lead to a more objective understanding of race-related topics. To address this need, I realized the importance of developing a program to evaluate the level of media bias in race-focused news articles. This paper aims to fill that gap by introducing a localized database created through a detailed review of hundreds of race-related articles. This unique database will enable more thorough assessments of racial bias in the media. Additionally, I have developed a specialized scoring function to evaluate media bias related to racism. This function combines scores from the local database with tf-idf values, allowing the program to accurately measure bias in articles that address sensitive racial issues.
