While Nigeria has a vibrant press media landscape, freedom of the press is only rated as “partly free” by Freedom House, mostly due to political influences on reporting. Yet the extent to which these influences affect the quality of reporting remains insufficiently investigated. We address this gap by analyzing how three newspapers with different political affiliations report on conflict in the run-up to the 2015 elections. Our analyses indicate that biases in reporting are generally limited, and that while political pressures are real, they are most evident in editorial choices.

We analyze and compare three separate efforts to code bias in Malaysia's media and find strong empirical evidence of an ongoing and profound progovernment bias in coverage. We also find, however, significant variation in bias between different types of news outlets. While Malay and Anglophone sources tended to be strongly progovernment, Chinese-language and online outlets were far more impartial. We demonstrate that both the general bias and the variation in it are largely the result of two factors: (1) government censorship and (2) ownership structures that link many major outlets to the ruling coalition. These findings provide a detailed view of the struggle for media independence in a less-than-democratic regime and supply insight into media bias across both authoritarian and democratic regimes in Asia, as well as outside it.