Deadline Hollywood, commonly referred to as Deadline, is an online news source primarily focused on news within the entertainment industry. It was founded in 2006 by Nikki Finke under the name Deadline Hollywood Daily. Today, it is a prominent entertainment news organization, receiving high volumes of traffic to its site. This past July, there were 42.3 million visits to Deadline’s online site. Additionally, Deadline boasts that its blog posts have regularly received more reader comments than all other entertainment industry news sites combined.
With a large number of visits and interactions with its posts, the question of whether Deadline is biased warrants a closer look. In this article, we will analyze the news site’s coverage and editorial decisions to determine if there is a discernible political bias in their reporting. Through our analysis, we aim to answer the question of whether Deadline is biased as well as highlight the factors that contribute to media bias in general.
How Does Biasly Rate News Sources?
Biasly’s algorithms produce bias ratings to help provide multiple perspectives on given articles. Biasly has analyzed 200,000+ news articles from more than 3,200 news sources through our A.I. technology and team of political analysts to find the most factual, unbiased news stories.
Biasly determines the degree of political bias in news sources by using Biasly’s Bias Meter Rating, in which Biasly’s team analyzes media sources’ reliability and bias and produces three scores, a Reliability Score that measures the accuracy of media sources; an A.I. Bias Score, evaluated by A.I.; and an Analyst Bias Score evaluated by political analysts. These scores are rated based on seven rating metrics including Tone, Tendency, Diction, Author Check, Selection/Omission, Expediency Bias, and Accuracy. These metrics help our analysts to determine the political attitude of the article.
Our A.I. machine-learning system employs natural language processing and entity-specific sentiment analysis to examine individual articles and determine their bias levels. By analyzing the key terms in an article such as policies, bias phrases, political terminologies, politicians, and their nicknames, the algorithms can rate the attitude of the text. Bias scores range from -100% and 100%, with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral.
Is Deadline Politically Biased?
Biasly’s rating for Deadline gives the entertainment newspaper a Computer AI Bias Score of Medium Liberal, a score generated by its AI-based algorithms. Biasly’s AI bias analysis focuses on the leaning of tone, opinion, and diction of the author, and, their respective tendencies. For example, Biasly’s AI rated its border wall and government interference policies as Somewhat Liberal with sentiments that support each of those issues from a liberal viewpoint. Additionally, it found that conservative politicians such as Donald Trump were covered in a negative light.
Typically, alongside the Computer Bias Score, Biasly presents an Analyst Bias Score. This score is curated based on a review of at least 15 articles by a team of analysts representing liberal, moderate, and conservative viewpoints. Different types of bias in articles, preferences for liberal or conservative politicians and policies, all factor into generating these scores. The more articles the Biasly analyst team reviews and rates, the more precise the analyst score becomes. Deadline has not yet received an Analyst Bias Score, but we will look at various articles that Deadline has published and evaluate them using the same methods used by Biasly’s team of analysts.
Hollywood and the entertainment industry has often been referred to as supportive of liberal causes. Since Deadline covers the news within this sector, it may be inherently biased with the types of celebrities and their political opinions that are promoted in their articles. However, a majority of articles published on Deadline’s website have little to do with actual politics.
This does not imply that Deadline is exempt from bias, though the source covers mostly non-political news. The small portion of articles that discuss more political events in the traditional sense, such as the article “NPR Editor Resigns In Aftermath Of His Essay Criticizing Network For Bias” which discusses bias itself in the media.
Readers like yourself are more likely to have a stronger opinion of these types of political articles published by Deadline based on your political leaning as compared to the articles more focused on entertainment news. Though, it is important to keep in mind that sources such as these – where the reader is likely under the impression they are not consuming biased media – can be deceiving in how much bias they truly contain. In the remainder of this article, we will discuss ways to identify this bias so that you are able to distinguish between facts and opinion and become a more informed news reader.
Before we begin, we need to discuss bias. Bias is a natural function of humans, and we can express it both consciously and unconsciously. Bias is one of the most fundamental forms of pattern recognition in humans. This isn’t to lower the bar and say that “all things are biased,” but to explain the process in which we may come to trust certain news organizations that display patterns of coverage.
On the media’s part, there is an incentive to retain audiences, encourage them to purchase subscriptions, and rate products positively. Bias is a two-way street, people want to see news stories about things they care about, and the media needs viewers to continue their operations. This creates a positive feedback loop that influences what stories are covered and from what perspective. This also explains the actions of more liberal news organizations.
Analysis of Bias in Deadline Online Articles
The primary audience of Deadline, according to website traffic demographics, are people between the ages of 25 and 34 years old. This younger demographic typically votes for liberal candidates. Is it possible that Deadline would cater to this audience by providing left-leaning articles? We will examine some of their articles in more detail below to identify the signs.
Source: Pew Research
To begin identifying the biases present in Deadline’s articles, we will first look at expediency bias. This relates to the immediate impression created by elements like the article’s headline, images, or summary, indicating if they favor a particular viewpoint.
Source: Deadline.com
For example, the headline of this article chooses to use the phrase, ‘battle-tested leader,’ from Vice President Kamala Harris to describe Tim Walz. Though it is a quote from Harris, the choice to put these strong and very positive words to describe Walz in the article’s headline shows liberal bias. The rest of the immediate appearance of the article is not as biased, however. The beginning part of the headline is centrist, and the photo of Walz does not reveal any bias either.
To look at the other common metrics used to determine bias, we will focus on a short article published on Deadline called “Aaron Sorkin Says Audiences Wouldn’t Recognize “Reasonable Republicans” If He Made ‘The West Wing’ Today.” This article has a lot of liberal bias. Part of the reason for this is that though the article is mainly quoting Sorkin, the majority of his statements contain heavy liberal bias and are not balanced with any opinions or statements to the contrary.
The tone, which is the author’s attitude in the article, is very negative towards the modern-day Republican party. This is made clear when the author refers to Sorkin’s statements:
“But there is one element from his Emmy-winning series that viewers couldn’t vibe with today, Sorkin told the audience Saturday during a mini-cast reunion of The West Wing: the idea that reasonable Republicans work on Capitol Hill.”
This means that Sorkin does not believe that there are any reasonable Republicans in office today. The tone of this statement that refers to Sorkin’s show, The West Wing, is contemptuous. Especially the diction used by the author, or the specific wording, such as ‘couldn’t vibe with’ implies a disdainful view towards modern-day Republican politicians.
Another factor that contributes to potential bias in an article is tendency. This measures how consistently an author shows bias in their work, including factors like their tone and perspective. In this article we have been discussing, the tendency is somewhat high given the short length of the article. The reference to Republican politicians being unreasonable was mentioned a total of four times, including the reference in the headline. This results in increased liberal bias.
Bias that the author may have can be a factor in how biased an article is. The author of this article about The West Wing, Lynette Rice, is a Senior TV Writer for Deadline. However, It is not clear where she stands on the political spectrum since most articles she writes are about TV shows, so it is difficult to know for certain whether any bias Rice has infiltrated the article.
To sum it up, the author strives for objectivity by putting a lot of referencing in quotations, however, the article is still quite biased given its tone, diction, and tendency. The author provides only a select perspective of the Republican party today, and this is one that is very unfavorable. Ultimately, the author spins the story to promote Sorkin’s claim that today’s Republicans are unreasonable. All of this suggests that, while some elements of this article were neutral, the article was found to be left-leaning overall, which aligns with our analysis of Deadline as a news source with a tendency to lean left in its biases.
It is important to note that article bias can differ between articles and authors in the same organization, even though articles such as this one fall on the left end of the spectrum. This is why it is crucial to look for the signs of bias — including (but not limited to) tone, tendency, diction, author, and expediency bias — in any article you come across.
To demonstrate, here’s one more article that demonstrates little to no bias throughout and also comes from Deadline: “Supreme Court Overturns Abortion Rights In Landmark Opinion” Biasly’s A.I. rating is “Center-Left,” as the language throughout is very objective, and the author states the facts of the event without adding any of their own opinion and avoiding emotionally-charged language:
“The Supreme Court was sealed off with a security barrier, as demonstrators on both sides of the issue gathered in anticipation of a ruling. The justices did not meet in person to announce their decisions, as they had in the past, leaving it to its website to post the opinion. Scotusblog reported the decision at about 10:10 AM ET, and broadcast networks broke into regular programming with the news.”
“The ruling Friday will lead to a wave of abortion restrictions across the country, especially in states with so-called trigger laws or preexisting laws in place that can be easily activated or enforced by conservative legislators.”
The author also does a good job of providing even coverage of both sides of the topic of abortion, providing a centrist article overall.
Who Owns Deadline?
Deadline is owned by the Penske Media Corporation. Jay Penske owns this corporation, and he is the son of multimillionaire Roger Penske. The father is a well-known backer of Donald Trump and a donor to the GOP. However, this evidently has not influenced the bias of Deadline, since it leans left rather than conservative. Jay Penske himself ultimately leads a private life, and it is not obvious what his political affiliation is.
Penske’s personal bias may or may not play a role in shaping the bias that Deadline contains. Penske owns many other entertainment news outlets such as Variety, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Billboard Music Charts, WWD, SHE Media, Robb Report, and more. Since all of these vary in their degrees of bias, it is somewhat unlikely that Penske’s bias would be a key factor in all of these source’s biases.
How to Evaluate and Uncover Bias
It can often be difficult to tell if the news you watch is biased. If you have settled on a news channel, it’s usually because you trust the information you are gaining. Unfortunately, many trust the information they are hearing because it confirms what they already believe. This is referred to as “confirmation bias.” It is important to challenge your beliefs and get third-party verification that what you are hearing is the full story. This is why we recommend using Biasly to compare different news stories side-by-side using our bias ratings to figure out what both sides think of a political issue.
Even though Biasly gave the Deadline a Medium Liberal bias score, remember that bias varies by article, and Deadline does not exclusively publish left-leaning articles. Additionally, some article types will inherently have more or less bias; general news articles are known for being less biased than opinion pieces. And while every article you read will be biased to some degree, some stick to the facts better than others, which is why it’s so important to use Biasly’s News Check to help you determine the bias of what you read.