This archive report was first published on 17 July 2020.
On July 17, 2020, The Factual, a California-based tech firm, released research findings that revealed women produce more trustworthy news reports on COVID-19 than men.
According to Philip Meylan, a political analyst at The Factual, female reporters dominate the top 25 most trusted journalists reporting on the coronavirus pandemic, with 19 out of 25 being female.
“Why are eight of them female out of 10? And so if you see that once, it's kind of incidental. You think, okay, well, that, you know, it's just random. It's what I chose. But we saw it over and over and over again,” Meylan said in an interview with VOA.
He further expressed confidence in female reporting, stating that female journalists were actually underrepresented (only 41%) in the total sample, suggesting that the findings could have been even more favorable to them.
Of the 39,084 articles reviewed by The Factual from 167 news outlets over 135 days, nearly 60% were written by male reporters.
“What those numbers tell us overall is just that, at least when it comes to coronavirus, female journalists have been more neutral in their tone," Meylan said. "They've been better resourced, and they've overall just produced better articles.”
The Factual relies on an artificial intelligence algorithm to determine the credibility of news content, considering the history of trustworthiness of a publication and the tone used by the author.
