BACKGROUND Legislating restrictions on alcohol advertising is a cost-effective measure to reduce consumption of alcohol. Yet Australia relies upon industry self-regulation through voluntary codes of practice regarding the content, timing and placement of alcohol advertising. Ending industry self-regulation was recommended by the National Preventative Health Taskforce; a suggestion contested by ...

Prior research has reported evidence of polarization in the consumption and distribution of political news in online social media. Methods to effectively measure slant of news articles at a large scale are lacking in prior literature. To fill this gap, we propose a method to measure slant of individual news articles by observing their sharing patterns on Twitter. Our method monitors tweets abou...

Television news has been the predominant way of understanding the world around us, but individual news broadcasters can frame or mislead audience’s understanding about political and social issues. We aim to develop a computer system that can automatically identify highly biased television news, which may prompt audience to seek news stories from contrasting viewpoints. But can computers determi...

The US presidential race, the re-election of President Hugo Chavez, and the economic crisis in Greece and other European countries are some of the controversial topics being played on the news everyday. To understand the landscape of opinions on political controversies, it would be helpful to know which politician or other stakeholder takes which position support or opposition on specific aspec...

T most of its history, the IOC insisted that sport was apart from the world of politics, and that the Olympic Games should not be used by sovereign states to further their political goals. Avery Brundage reflected this position best when instructing Lord Killanin just before Killanin left for South Africa in September 1967 to head up the IOC’s fact-finding committee on sport and apartheid. Brun...

We show that the demand for news varies with the perceived affinity of the news organization to the consumer’s political preferences. In an experimental setting, conservatives and Republicans preferred to read news reports attributed to Fox News and to avoid news from CNN and NPR. Democrats and liberals exhibited exactly the opposite syndrome – dividing their attention equally between CNN and N...