FILTERING REVOLUTION : Reporting Bias in International Newspaper Coverage of the Libyan Civil

Reporting bias – the media’s tendency to systematically under-report or over-report certain types of events – is a persistent problem for participants and observers of armed conflict. We argue that the nature of reporting bias depends on how news organizations navigate the political context in which they are based. Where government pressure on the media is limited – in democratic regimes – the scope of reporting should reflect conventional media preferences toward novel, large-scale, dramatic developments that challenge the conventional wisdom and highlight the unsustainability of the status quo. Where political constraints on reporting are more onerous – in non-democratic regimes – the more conservative preferences of the state will drive the scope of coverage, emphasizing the legitimacy and inevitability of the prevailing order. We test these propositions using new data on protest and political violence during the 2011 Libyan uprising and daily newspaper coverage of the Arab Spring from 113 countries. We uncover evidence of a status-quo media bias in non-democratic states, and a revisionist bias in democratic ones. Media coverage in non-democracies under-reported protests and nonviolent collective action by regime opponents, largely ignored government atrocities, and over-reported those caused by rebels. We find the opposite patterns in democratic states. Matthew A. Baum, Harvard University & Yuri Zhukov, University of Michigan