Political Bias on BBC, CNN, and Fox News - Doria

Starting with the Theme structure analysis, certain patterns are discovered. The
sentence-level Themes in the articles are divided into five categories: the critics of
the law, its supporters, the illegal immigrants, the law itself, and some other topic.
Table 4 demonstrates the number of each type of Theme.
Theme category BBC CNN FOX
Critics 3 0 5
Illegal immigrants 1 4 1
Supporters 4 1 4
The law 0 6 6
Other 1 7 8
Total 9 18 24
Table 4. Sentence-level Themes in the California Dream Act articles
In the BBC article, the law itself is not mentioned at all. Instead, the focus is on its
critics (e.g. Opponents of the law) and supporters (e.g. Jerry Brown). In the CNN
article, the focus is on the law (e.g. The California Dream Act) and the illegal
immigrants (e.g. About 2,500 students). Furthermore, in the Fox News article the
focus is similarly on the law (e.g. The bill) but also on both the critics (e.g. Many
Republican lawmakers) and supporters (e.g. Supporters) of it. It can be argued that,
while BBC considers the supporters and critics of the law to be the Given, CNN
considers the Given to be the law and the illegal immigrants, and Fox News
considers the law, its supporters, and its critics to be the Given. It can also be
proposed that, due to the lack of supporters in Theme position in the CNN article,
CNN may lean further right than anticipated. A closer examination of the entities in
Theme position reveals more. In the category other, for example, it must be noted
that Fox News mentions both illegal and illegally once, whereas neither BBC nor
CNN mentions either one.
Considering the issue of how illegal immigrants are identified, bias is revealed.
While BBC refers to illegal immigrants only once in Theme position with About
2,500 students and Fox News once with Illegal immigrants, CNN refers to them
twice with Undocumented students, once with About 2,500 students, and once with
Ana and Maria Gomez, Jaime Kim, David Cho, Pedro Ramirez -- and thousands of
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