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This study employs advanced political text analysis techniques to examine the political content of German language online media from 2019 to 2022, focusing on major global events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The analysis reveals that while national media coverage converges around international crises, significant divergences emerge in domestically influenced categories, highlighting the impact of national policies and institutional structures. Additionally, the research contrasts the stable political narratives of newspapers with the reactive, event-driven nature of Twitter discourse, underscoring the role of international crises in shaping political content across different media platforms.
International crises can synchronize political narratives across media, but national policies still drive significant divergence in coverage.
Today most media content is consumed based on algorithmic recommendations. Evidence suggests that this can lead to politically biased media consumption patterns. Automated extraction of political agendas from texts can reveal and analyze political biases in online media -- and thus help fostering politically unbiased media consumption. Here we employ modern political text analysis methods demonstrating the potential of automated fine-grained political bias analysis in online media. We conduct an analysis of political content in German language online media during the period 2019--2022, encompassing several million articles and tweets covering events with profound societal impact globally and nationally, the COVID-19 pandemic and the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Our analysis identifies thematic similarity between national (German and Swiss) reporting, particularly for categories driven by international events. We also find divergences emerging in domestically influenced categories, reflecting differences in national policies and institutional structures. A comparison of newspaper and Twitter discourse reveals that both media converge around a shared core during the pandemic, yet differ in intensity and temporal dynamics. Newspapers exhibit more stable political content, while Twitter reacts through short-lived event-driven spikes. These findings indicate that international crises act as a powerful synchronizing force on political content in classical media, temporarily overriding both national and media-form differences. Our automated political analysis empowers citizens by rendering political agendas in online media transparent. This transparency also enables media outlets to bridge the gap between algorithm-driven echo chambers and a more informed, balanced public discourse.
