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Is the Daily Republic Biased?

By · Jul 18, 2024 · 8 min read

Is the Daily Republic Biased?

The Daily Republic is a newspaper based in Fairfield, California, a town with a population just shy of 120,000. While local issues represent most of what’s published by this outlet, they occasionally venture into national topics that are relevant for various audiences across the country.

 Party affiliation among adults in California: 30% Republican/lean Republican, 21% No lean, 49% Democrat/lean Democrat.
Before beginning, we should take note of California’s political makeup as a whole and consider implications as they relate to journalism in the state. Information provided by Pew Research (https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/database/state/california/).

Regardless of whether they’re covering content that’s meant for Californians or Americans at large, the question still remains: is the Daily Republic biased? There are a plethora of article analyses that allow us to dive into this, but before doing so, it’s important to consider how Biasly evaluates news sources.

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 the Daily Republic Politically Biased?

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.

According to Biasly metrics, the Daily Republic has an A.I. score of ‘Center Right,’ meaning it’s essentially a neutral source, with a very slight conservative lean. Biasly also offers an analyst categorization of ‘Center,’ meaning it leans neither slightly liberal nor slightly conservative. The Daily Republic is classified as being right in the middle, eliminating suspicion of any major bias within the outlet.

Of course, that isn’t necessarily to say that the outlet is free of bias on an article-to-article basis. Biasly has evaluated a variety of different Daily Republic pieces and coded them for bias using a specific algorithm, which will be elaborated upon shortly.

Analysis of Bias in a Daily Republic Article

When determining bias, the metrics that we use include tone, tendency, author, diction, and expediency bias. Let’s briefly expand on each concept:

  • Tone: The attitude displayed in the writing, related to the author’s word choices or diction.
  • Diction: The words chosen by the author.
  • Author: Relates to the article’s author, considering their history of stance on issues based on past articles and social media posts.
  • Tendency: Measures how consistently an author shows bias in their work, including factors like their tone and perspective.
  • Expediency Bias: Initial impressions created by concepts like the article’s headline, images, or summary, indicating if they favor a particular viewpoint.

When Biasly assessed a selection of Daily Republic articles, the findings for each individual category listed above reflected the overall rating it gave the newspaper. On average, the articles have low ratings for tone, tendency, diction, author, and expediency bias, indicating no notable issues within those categories. This is important to consider because it shows how minimal the recordable bias is– it’s nearly nonexistent. With that being said, there are some outliers, such as left-leaning or right-leaning opinion pieces.

Let’s take a look at a specific article that was reviewed and analyzed by Biasly. Below is a snippet of a Daily Republic commentary piece (meaning they are openly expressing an opinion) entitled “Pharmaceutical Innovation Is Winning the War on COVID. Biden Shouldn’t Disarm” (attached is the original piece published on the Heritage foundation’s website to avoid hitting the Daily Republic’s paywall).

“As the COVID-19 vaccines show, pharmaceutical innovation provides the best hope of ending the pandemic. Unfortunately, the Biden administration is launching what amounts to a federal assault against such innovation.

That assault will take the form of federal price controls on prescription medicines. When the House of Representatives attempted to impose such controls in 2019, the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) said it could result in as many as 100 fewer drugs entering the market over the next decade.

Administration sources say the next phase of the Biden ‘build back better’ platform will likely include drug price control provisions similar to those the House passed that year on a party-line vote. The measure died in the Senate, which the GOP then controlled.”

Keep in mind the specific things that Biasly looks for when determining bias.

The diction of this piece, for example, indicates some bias. The use of the word “assault” suggests disapproval of President Biden’s actions from the author, which helps pull back the curtain on his ideology and how that might impact his ability to cover certain topics in a fair way. The use of this word multiple times across different paragraphs suggests a higher tendency, as the diction is spread out and consistent.

The tone is also quite anti-Biden, going hand-in-hand with the diction choices. Towards the end of the article, the author suggests that President Biden is a master of getting nothing done, a sort of sarcastic remark with a negatively humorous tone. Here, the author is almost making fun of Biden.

Furthermore, you may notice that the author himself, Doug Bader, is associated with the Heritage Foundation. A quick Google search tells us that the Heritage Foundation is a conservative think tank that endorsed Nikki Haley for president in 2023. When Biasly rates the author of each individual article, they do so to detect any potential bias, such as the bias being displayed here from Bader through his ties to a conservative group.

In terms of expediency bias, this piece seems to be fairly well thought-out despite a clear ideological boundary guiding the work, and the author doesn’t seem to jump to any conclusions.

While everything that was just said may imply a conservative bias within the Daily Republic as a whole, it’s important to stress that this specific piece is an outlier and tendency is not much of a concern here.

To sum it up, the bias of this piece doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of content reviewed by Biasly from this outlet had very low scores across the board, indicating total neutrality. This specific piece is only being evaluated to highlight how Biasly tracks different concepts and scores them.

For example, articles like Solano part of Bay Area planning grant for ADA riders and Suisun City takes cautious approach to Supreme Court decision on homelessness are rated as ‘Center’ by Biasly in the category of Media Bias.        

Additionally, there’s an opinion piece from the Daily Republic entitled “Save America from Project 2025,” suggesting a fair amount of anti-Trump (and potentially pro-Biden) rhetoric. Readers can’t paint everything about this source with the same brush– some articles are left-leaning, while others are right-leaning. And of course, many are simply placed squarely in the middle.

Other Factors to Consider and Other Analyses

Unfortunately, there is very little external research that’s accessible by the general public surrounding the Daily Republic’s bias or lack thereof. If you take a look at the newspaper’s online reviews, you will find mixed feedback. One woman wrote “this paper is extremely biased and conservative and provides very little news that you can’t get somewhere else,” while a few other people insinuated that the Daily Republic was too liberal-leaning for their liking. Reviews were found on Yelp and the newspaper’s Facebook page.

Of course, we recognize that all online comments must be taken with a grain of salt, and they don’t serve as credible analyses of the paper. Their role is merely to give us a sense of what people are saying, which is especially helpful when so few major research organizations have supplied information on the Daily Republic’s bias.

Additionally, when there are conflicting reviews about the newspaper and opposing insinuations about political bias, it’s hard to pin down one general attitude from the public, and this suggests that the personal beliefs of each individual could be interfering with their ability to accurately review the media at hand. It’s always worth noting the political makeup of an audience that reads a specific newspaper, so let’s look at the Daily Republic’s audience.

President and Vice President - Vote for 1 one party

According to data from the Solano County local government database (the county in which Farfield is located), residents favored President Biden, the Democrat, over former President Trump, the Republican, in the 2020 presidential election. This suggests that the town is liberal-leaning, and this data should be considered when evaluating both the content produced by the Daily Republic and the reviews provided about the newspaper by Fairfield residents.

Who Owns the Daily Republic? What can this tell us?

The Daily Republic is owned by McNaughton Newspapers. The McNaughton family (seen in the photo below) has a long history in journalism, dating back to the 1920s. They have owned the Daily Republic since the early 1960s, making it a family-owned and operated newspaper. The McNaughton family hasn’t publicly declared a specific political affiliation, and there is no significant instance that indicates a political bias in the family’s past.

What can we Conclude About the Daily Republic?

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.

The Daily Republic is a relatively unbiased, nonpartisan news source. This can be determined both through Biasly’s A.I. assessment and the analysis of each article’s ratings. While the commentary piece evaluated earlier was dubbed quite conservative, it’s not reflective of the Daily Republic as a whole.

This outlet has low average ratings for each evaluated category, and non-opinion pieces don’t feature high tone, tendency, author, diction, or expediency bias. Our bias meter shows little to no bias– but rather a ‘Center’ leaning– and this is backed up with a more comprehensive look at the Daily Republic’s content. There is no significant instance of political bias in the McNaughton family’s past, which further advances the notion that the Daily Republic is a center-based, unbiased news source.

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