Assessing Liberal Bias: A Study on Political Polarity in U.S. College Newspapers
This study investigates political polarity trends across U.S. colleges, using the opinion section from student-written newspapers as a comparable data source. We hypothesized that independent US college newspapers are becoming increasingly liberally biased over time, reflecting political polarity trends in these colleges. A text corpora from 32 diverse colleges from 2010 to 2022 was collected using custom web crawlers. After applying natural language processing (NLP) and the Bipartisan Press Polarity API, statistical analyses considering various demographics and institutional attributes affirm the prevalence of a liberal bias in these college newspapers. These findings also reveal a strong positive correlation between the voting patterns of the surrounding county and the polarity of colleges within it. Among the colleges analyzed, there was a limited correlation between liberal bias and the ratio of males to females, disproving common stereotypes of females being more left-leaning. Additionally, private liberal arts schools exhibited the greatest trend toward increasingly liberal views from 2010 to 2022. These analyses also find a more significant liberal bias in suburban colleges than rural and urban ones.
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