Figure 6 - Individual Keywords, for the Category "Politics"

Looking at the individual keywords in the figure above, we can see that the results are evenly distributed in most cases, except when it comes to the term regime. This is interesting, as the word itself has a negative connotation, despite not being negative in its meaning For one set of arguments on this topic, see the article here: https://hiredknaves.wordpress.com/2014/02/28/when-a-government-becomes-a-regime/ . We can see that the terms has been used more than four times as often when referring to Venezuela. Regarding Venezuela, the keyword regime was used in 83.3% of articles at least once, while in the case off Saudi Arabia, the word was used in the 13% of the articles in the sample. Hence we can conclude that the results are valid, as the word regime is not concentrated in a handful of articles on Venezuela, but present in most of them. Apart from the validity of the data, it is key to assert that Saudi Arabia is called a regime in only 13% of all cases, confirming the hypothesis of a bias in the media. Since both Saudi Arabia and Venezuela are technically regimes, but only one is called often with this pejorative term, the bias in media is clearly against the Venezuelan regime. This is confirmed by other keywords, such as dictator, authoritarian, and tyrant, as the terms can be applied to both cases, according to the Democracy Index for 2018, which ranks Venezuela at 134 (authoritarian), and Saudi Arabia at 159 (authoritarian). Saudi Arabia is ranked lower, and as such we would expect unbiased media to use these keywords more often for it, again, supporting our hypothesis.

The case for the keywords democracy is more difficult, however, as it is a word that can be applied as a positive term, but also as an aspiration. To distinguish between them, we will look at cases where articles on Venezuela mention it, keeping in mind that the hypothesis will be supported, if democracy is used less as a descriptor, and rather as the problem discussed in the article (such as “lack of democracy”) etc. Annex II shows all cases of text with mentions of the word democracy in the case of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. There we can see that some most mentions pertain to policies to support Venezuela's “return to democracy”, and “restoration of democracy” on the one hand and pointing out that the US and “other democracies” are in support of such returns to democracy. For example, President Trump is quoted in one article as saying:

“I will continue to use the full weight of United States economic and diplomatic power to press for the restoration of Venezuelan democracy. We continue to hold the illegitimate Maduro regime directly responsible for any threats it may pose to the safety of the Venezuelan people.” Full article can be found at: https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/dr-marc-siegel-time-to-end-the-humanitarian-crisis-in-venezuela-maduro-needs-to-be-removed-from-power, or in the article database, to be provided upon request.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, the mentions refer to the relation between Islam and democracy, and that Trump is losing moral high ground when facing non-democratic states, due to internal US issues, as in this article:

“The consequences of failing to act swiftly and decisively in this case will be only one more confirmation that President Trump and the United States are no longer any sort of model for democracy or freedom anywhere in the world and will only give comfort to the forces of darkness and extremism that are so broadly on the rise.”Full article can be found at: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/12/opinions/khashoggi-disappearance-trump-wrong-side-opinion-andelman/index.html. or in the article database, to be provided upon request.

Note that the article is not calling for Saudi democracy, but merely pointing out that the US is less of a model for democracy under Trump.

Here we can see that the word democracy, when used in relation to Venezuela, is used in such a way by the authors, as to rally support against the current government, by calling for a restoration of a seemingly lost democracy. However, not one call for building democracy can be found in the case of Saudi Arabia. As such, this seemingly contradictory high level of use of the term democracy in relation to Venezuela is in fact supporting the hypothesis. It should be noted that Venezuela is not considered a democracy by many states, but its status is not unanimously accepted as such, giving further strength to the argument. The media, in other words, is using the word democracy as an ideal, to be contrasted to the descriptive words, such as authoritarian or dictator in the case of Venezuela, while abstaining from such descriptive words altogether in relation to Saudi Arabia, using the formal term monarchy and the Democracy Index term authoritarian, only 4 times throughout the entire dataset.

Analysis and Discussion

This section intends to bring together the results from both the Social Network Analysis, and the case studies in media discourse analysis. The theoretical foundations of the research is based on structuralism, and as such, we want to look at the different elements explored here, and trace their mutual relationships. On the highest conceptual level, we have the general system of the modern democratic republic, in our case represented by the United States. In such systems, as the literature review has shown, various levels of actors are competing for influence on policy decisions, and at different intensity - for example, corporation may lobby permanently on foreign policy, while the public at large may do so only periodically, particularly when informed on such issues. At this point, we enter the information problem in democracies, where information is not uniformly available, but accessed through gatekeeper, such as the media, politicians, protests and other public assemblies, etc. As per the regulatory capture literature, the less the public is informed, the more likely special interests are to influence policies that not popular to that same public.

If we take this rule as not just to pertain to regulation of special interests, but to actually apply to foreign policy too, then we can conclude that special interests will try to influence the government, and will be more successful when the public is not informed, if such policies are not in the popular interest. However, what is missing from this analysis, is that the primary institution for the dissemination of information to the public - i.e. the news media, are themselves vulnerable to special interests. The largest media in the US are corporate, privately owned, and competitive for resources and profits. The media, furthermore, uses the viewers/readers as a resource, which it turns into a product - advertisement space. Advertisement space is often the largest revenue stream, but even in cases where it is smaller, it is nonetheless crucial, as our literature review has shown. This advertisement space is then sold to corporations for revenue.

This means that the incentive structure for the media is such that it wants to reach as many advertisement-worthy viewers as possible, and to sell this audience to other corporations as ad space. If we then imagine a conflicting interest between the public and corporations which form a foreign policy special interest, it is clear that government is not the only battleground where such a conflict will take place, but that the media, dependent on both groups, will itself be a major battleground. As media is one of the primary “slack-reducing” information providers to maintain a informed public, special interests have every incentive to try and influence the how and what the media is presenting to the public, and position itself in way as to have control over the media, not just as the primary customer, but also as the owner of such media. This, of course, is not controversial by any means, as ownership of shares in media companies is legal and even considered as socially rewarding, with movies and tv-shows often portraying the media as economically unsuccessful, but as crucial warriors for democracy.

From the perspective of this analysis, the key issue is how much influence special interests wield over the media. We hypothesized that this will mean that special interests have access to media boards of directors on the one hand, and that this will lead to an overall change in the discourse in such a way as to over-represent the special interests. This set hypotheses is limited in scope, and does not look at how media are influenced by corporations as customers of ad-space, but look at direct influence instead.

To test the hypotheses, we examined the network of special interests with a high level of political interest in foreign policy, which we limited to the oil and defence industries, and the biggest corporate media. We used a Social Network Analysis method, as it is best suited for research of links between different corporations, since corporations have a hierarchical structure, with the owners on top, where the decision making takes place. Corporate owners are represented by major shareholders, who participate in discrete bodies called boards of directors, and these function either as policy makers, or policy approvers in the vast majority of corporations. As such, their interests are closely aligned with the interests of the corporation as an fictitious person. Since both corporate media and special interest corporations have this structure, we looked at board of directors' shared seats across these corporate entities. By doing so, we could establish the closeness between two specific bodies.

The SNA showed us that the network we examined is more tightly knit (the social network diameter is 7) than a randomly generated network with the same number of nodes (which had an average diameter of 9.7). This means that information flow between special interests and the media is relatively easy - a diameter of 7 indicates that among the 55 entities examined, each was a maximum of 7 steps distant to the board of directors of another entity. While this is the maximum distance between any two nodes, we also saw that different entities had more or less of a central role in the network.

By looking at the Closeness Centrality, we measured which corporations are best placed to potentially influence the entire network most quickly; while Betweenness Centrality told us which corporations are choke points of information flow in the network. These measures showed us that think tanks play a crucial role in the system, as they bridge the gap between control and content. Boards of directors have direct control over the CEO of a media company, who has hire-and-fire and other hierarchical tool at their disposal to control the editorial board, who, in turn, control the journalists through their human resources powers, as well as by determining which journalists gets which story, ad which stories go to print or on the air. This power of special interests board members sitting also on media boards is limited by the fact that content is produced from below - the journalists, who will likely never meet the CEO or the board members.

As such, a structural analysis of media bias would predict the existance of institutions which would produce content that can then be picked up by journalists, who would then be approved by editors, who have been chosen by CEOs who consider the content of such institutions as valid based on the board membership links to such institution and the media board. These institutions are varied, from universities to research institutes, but primarily think tanks, which are private bodies who do not have a public interest mandate.

In our limited sample of 55 bodies linked in a network of interlinked board membership, the think tanks Council on Foreign Relations was the most central in terms of betweenness centrality, and fifth in terms of closeness centrality, meaning that it is the primary influencer of the entire network, while also being positioned highly in terms of being able to restrict the free movement of information in the network. The corporate nature of the Council on Foreign Relations is clear, as they boast of 150 corporate members, with the founding corporations including Chevron Corporation, Exxon Mobil Corporation, and Hess Corporation. In addition, their website boasts of individual member that include “top government officials, scholars, lawyers, nonprofit professionals, journalists, educators, religious leaders, and business executives” For more detail see: https://www.cfr.org/membership . As the publicly stated goal of think tanks is to influence public debate, it comes as no surprise that they would play a key role in the flow of information between those corporations they represent, and media corporation linked to them through shared board seats. We proceeded with the assumption that the think tans provide this key service of generating content in the interest of special interests, however it would be an interesting addition to this research to add think tanks to the analysis of narratives.

These finding so far helps us conceptualize the broader structures which are at play in this system. We can see, for instance, that media corporations are linked to oil and defense special interests through board membership, and that boards have a structurally determined power over the hierarchically lover tiers of these organizations. Furthermore, there is an infrastructure in place to generate content that would be of interest to the special interests, in the form of think tanks, which can then rely on the overall network to disseminate information in line with the interests of special interests. As in any network, unlike in hierarchies, this does not guaranty successful hegemony of information flow. It does, however, increase the likelihood of hegemony. In a hierarchy, on the other hand, power is direct, and disobedience is met with repression (read layoffs or reassignment). As such, our research maps out where networks meet hierarchies, showing how corporations (the archetypal hierarchy) act as notes in a network of influence, information flow, and soft power.

Since we cannot measure directly the influence of the network on the hierarchies, we looked at the final product: the media content itself. From our structural analysis of the media - special interest complex, we would predict that media narratives will be representative of the interests of special interests, which were defined as an overarching desire to open foreign markets to ownership of companies by the US industries and to trade in goods and services that the special interests produce. As such, we hypothesized that the media will have a critical stance towards governments that have been reducing their openness to US oil and defense industries, and a less negative stance on those which were opening up, in times when those foreign government act in ways that would be condemned by the public. We looked at the crackdown on protests in Venezuela, as the case of condemnable act of a closing country - as the Maduro government continued to bar foreign oil companies and continued to rely on Russian arm trade. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, was used as an example of a regime that was responsible for the assassination of a Saudi journalist who was a US permanent resident and worked in the US.

If our hypothesis is not valid, we would see that media treats both cases with the same negative criticism, or more criticism of the open regime. To test this hypothesis, we sampled all opinion articles produced in a span of one month after the condemnable event had happened. The dataset of the entire corpus of opinions was then analyzed using keyword density analysis, as variant of word frequency analysis that looks at the relative weight of keywords as a percentage of the whole text. We found that critical keywords, such as dictator, regime, etc. were overwhelmingly used to describe the closed foreign government, more than twice as often as in the case of the open government.

We subdivided the keywords into categories, that included rights of citizens, governance, government type, and international relations. We saw that in 3 cases, the critical terms were used two or more times as often when describing the closed government, and in one case just slightly more to describe the open government. In the last case, a deeper look revealed that this is primarily due to a high concentration of the keyword human rights in one article, which skewed the data. Despite this exception, the hypothesis was accepted, as overall use of critical terms in describing closed regimes was overwhelmingly confirming the presence of bias.

As such, both hypotheses were accepted, and a positive answer can be given to the research question: Does the media show a bias in favor of special interest narratives in its reporting on foreign policy of the US government? We could add that the mechanism for this bias towards special interests is based on a structural basis, where hierarchies are embedded into closely knit networks of influence, and in both cases special interests wield a disproportionate influence over the public and public interests (e.g. unions or concerned citizens groups). In networks the public is not fully powerless, but they are in an inferior role, since they have low centrality in the networks, which make them inefficient in controlling information flow and influence over the network as whole. At the same time, the public has very limited power the hierarchies, as control rests on the top by definition.

The research has several limitations, in terms of scope, and internal and external validity. The scope of this research was limited to one country, and all measures were done on the national level. However, individual states also have a limited number of foreign relations, such as in border states. This, however, does not directly invalidate the results, merely means that different levels of government need to also be studied, as a national special interest can have even larger effects on local media, leading to even greater bias.

Another issue is the fact that there are alternative explanations for the observed phenomena, such as the possibility that media are bias due to nationalism or patriotism of their journalists, who will always see a closed country as a adversary, and hence the bias is not due to special interests, but is external (psychologically internal may be more precise). This however is not so much a research methodology issue as it is epistemological, as it is not clear why anyone feels a nationalist sentiment towards another country. Neither Saudi Arabia nor Venezuela pose a direct threat to the US, but a threat to “US interests”, which, if look at the history of US interests, are always either strategic interests of geopolitics of the interests of special interests. It is hence impossible to claim that there are two separate categories of nationalism and special interest, as these overlap to such an extent that it is impossible to talk about one without the other. What we can assert is that if nationalism was the primary motivator, Saudi Arabia would certainly be on the receiving end of criticism, since the 43% of Americans see Saudi Arabia as “unfriendly” or an “enemy”, and only 27% as an “ally” or “friendly” Frankovic, K. (2018, October 17). Americans had limited trust in Saudi Arabia even before Khashoggi. Opgehaald van YouGov: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2018/10/17/america-had-limited-trust-saudi-arabia-even-disapp. This may have a more sympathetic distribution in the media editorial boards, but again, why would media CEOs and editorials and board members be more positive on Saudi Arabia, if not for reasons of interest? And this only confirms the finding of the paper even more, as we would predict that the higher up the hierarchy an individual is, the more likely it is that they will be filtered out in ways that would conform to the concerns of the special interest. If journalists are less sympathetic to the Saudi government, then why would they be biased in its favor, except due to editorial choices made, again confirming our prediction. The other option is that the opinions on Venezuela are far more negative than that on Saudi Arabia, but polls are not available. Still, since Saudi Arabia assassinated a US resident, has supported Salafist terrorists, is a predominantly Muslim country (and anti-socialist sentiments are down in comparison to anti-Islam sentiment PEW Research Center. (2017, July 26). How the U.S. general public views Muslims and Islam. Opgehaald van PewForum: https://www.pewforum.org/2017/07/26/how-the-u-s-general-public-views-muslims-and-islam/), while Venezuela is mostly a distant thought to most Americans, as evidenced by the lack of polling data.

This paper focuses on an unexplored area of study, that look at the relations between special interests and media, and with this approach, the government is left on the sidelines. While we conceptually treat the government as a passive agent, we do acknowledge that in reality this is not so. The government, in general, is not isolated from the networks and hierarchies studied here, but are both subjects and objects with which special interests, the public, and media interact in complex ways. However, as the study by Levine and Forrence (1990 Levine, M. E., & Forrence, J. L. (1990). Regulatory Capture, Public Interest, and the Public Agenda: Toward a Synthesis. Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, 167-198) showed, the government is more likely to address concerns of special interests and not the public, when there is little public attention, and that public attention is dependent most pertinently on the news media. As we showed that special interests impact how media present issues to the public, we can conclude that the government is influenced in the same ways. The contribution of this research is to complicate how we study relations between these different actors, by looking at the media as an integral part of the web or relations and influences, and not as an objective outside actor removed from the struggle for hegemonic control of discourses.

Conclusion

This research looked at media bias from a new perspective, in which bias was treated as the result of influence by special interests. By tracing the social network of board members in media corporations and in boards of special interests organizations, we showed that this influence happens through a complex web of hierarchies embedded in a network. We showed how common it is for board members of a media corporation to sit in other boards that pose a clear conflict of interest for the public interest that the media should represent. This is true not just for foreign policy issues, but rather for all issues of public interest. The low number of mentions of climate change in extreme weather event reporting Arkush, D. (2017). A Storm of Silence - Media Coverage of Climate Change and Hurricane Harvey. Washington, D.C.: Public Citizen's Climate Program., despite clear scientific evidence of the links between the two phenomena is just another example of the negative consequences this can have on public discourse.

Secondly, we showed how media narratives are overwhelmingly faworable towards the special interests in foreign policy matters, particularly when it comes to favorable and unfavorable governments. Foreign governments, regardless of their similarity in international indices of freedom, press freedom, and democracy, are presented more positively if the government is open to special interests, even when these governments score worse on the aforementioned indices. News media opinion articles will regularly invoke the need for democracy when writing about closed governments, while avoiding the use of negative keywords when describing open governments, including words that are generally agreed upon by international observes. As such, it is important to note that public opinion is formed, and not a given constant, which means that media bias can be catastrophic in situations where crippling sanctions or other measures are imposed on closed governments, that may not represent any solution to the actual problem in such a country, but merely represent the concerns of special interests of the home country - the US in this case, but this can apply to any state where special interests can shape media narratives. If we accept that democracy does die in darkness, then the results of this study should be a catalyst to enact urgent changes in the sphere of news media.

To conclude this paper, we will present some recommendations, informed by the results and analysis of issues researched here. Understanding that corporate media is biased through its close relationship to corporate special interests requires us to rethink how media could be reformed in ways that would make public interest the primary incentive of news media. While government officials are usually required to disclose conflicts of interest, this is not true for media corporation board members. Another good practice is the requirement of public officials to renounce profits from companies when they declare a conflict of interest. Another issue is the for-profit nature of media. Public media may be one solution, despite its problems of being too close to the government, which has often been criticized as risking censorship and is associated with authoritarian regimes who use it as a mouthpiece. Another solution is to use a voucher system, where a media tax is levied on the citizens, but in such a way that the citizens can choose any registered non-profit media company to donate it to. This recommendation maintains the public nature of media, while preventing government control. Through a combination of regulation and alternative media financing methods, the main pitfalls of media bias could be alleviated.

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Annex I

Codding Table of Concepts in Text Processed Version

Annex II

All mentions of the keyword “democracy” in articles on Venezuela and Saudi Arabia

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