AI as a Tool for Fair Journalism: Case Studies from Malta
This addresses the issue of media bias for journalists and the public in Malta, with incremental applications to similar contexts.
The paper tackles the problem of bias in journalism by developing AI tools to analyze news articles and videos in Malta, resulting in tools that detect incoherence between images and text and track on-screen time for individuals to identify potential biases.
In today`s media landscape, the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in shaping societal perspectives and journalistic integrity is becoming increasingly apparent. This paper presents two case studies centred on Malta`s media market featuring technical novelty. Despite its relatively small scale, Malta offers invaluable insights applicable to both similar and broader media contexts. These two projects focus on media monitoring and present tools designed to analyse potential biases in news articles and television news segments. The first project uses Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing techniques to analyse the coherence between images in news articles and their corresponding captions, headlines, and article bodies. The second project employs computer vision techniques to track individuals` on-screen time or visual exposure in news videos, providing queryable data. These initiatives aim to contribute to society by providing both journalists and the public with the means to identify biases. Furthermore, we make these tools accessible to journalists to improve the trustworthiness of media outlets by offering robust tools for detecting and reducing bias.