On the NSA, the media may tilt right

Since June 6, 2013, the world has been roiled by an ongoing series of disclosures based on Edward Snowden’s document leaks, with coverage led by the Guardian and the Washington Post, about clandestine mass surveillance conducted, with little oversight, by the National Security Agency and its international partners. Public perceptions of these surveillance revelations are affected not only by the NSA’s actual actions, but also by the news coverage of the government’s spying programs.

Our analysis of total press coverage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) between July 1 and July 31 (July was the first full calendar month after the initial disclosures in June) revealed that the widely held assumption that major media outlets uniformly tilt to the left does not match reality. If anything, the media appears to tilt to the right, at least on this issue. Of the 30 traditionally pro- or anti-surveillance terms we examined in four newspapers (The New York Times, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post), key words generally used to justify increased surveillance, such as security or terrorism, were used much more frequently than terms that tend to invoke opposition to mass surveillance, such as privacy or liberty.

Our findings indicate that the intense public concern about the NSA’s activities is not merely an artifact of biased coverage, since the media actually appears to be biased in the opposite direction. Public opposition to the government surveillance might be even more pronounced if overall media coverage was neutral and unbiased.