News consumers expect news outlets to be objective and balanced in their reports of events and opinions. However, there is a growing body of evidence of bias in the media caused by underlying political and socio-economic viewpoints. Previous studies have tried to classify the partiality of the media, but there is little work on quantifying it, and less still on the nature of this partiality. Th...

Humans are a coalitional, parochial species. Yet, extreme actions of solidarity are sometimes taken for distant or unrelated groups. What motivates people to become solidary with groups to which they do not belong originally? Here, we demonstrate that such distant solidarity can occur when the perceived treatment of an out-group clashes with one's political beliefs (e.g., for Leftists, oppressi...

This paper presented a multimodal discourse analysis of some visual images in the political rally discourse of 2011 electioneering campaigns in Southwestern Nigeria. The data comprised purposively selected political visual artefacts from political rallies across the six Southwestern States in Nigeria (Osun, Oyo, Ondo, Ekiti, Ogun, and Lagos). The data were analyzed using Halliday’s (1985) syste...

Islamophobia’s occurrence in any particular country has little do with the presence of Muslim; it is possible to be Islamophobic when there are virtually no Muslim around. This because the lack of Muslims is filled by the surplus of Islamophobic representations. This surplus of representations is now increasingly reliant on the internet. There are many studies reporting on Islamophobia on the i...

We present an economic model of media bias and media mergers. Media owners have political motives as well as profit motives, and can influence public opinion by withholding information that is pejorative to their political agenda — provided that their agenda is not too far out of the political mainstream. This is true even with rational consumers who understand the media owners’ biases, because...

We propose and test a new theory explaining glass-ceiling bias against nonnative speakers as driven by perceptions that nonnative speakers have weak political skill. Although nonnative accent is a complex signal, its effects on assessments of the speakers' political skill are something that speakers can actively mitigate; this makes it an important bias to understand. In Study 1, White and Asia...