Spanish Media Monitor uses AI techniques and data analysis to compare the topics covered by five television channels, the time devoted to them and the tone of the information about political parties

information about political parties.

The Spanish Media Monitor (SMM) project has created a free, publicly accessible platform to analyse how the nightly news programmes on Spain’s leading television channels cover current political affairs. Using artificial intelligence and data analysis techniques, the tool identifies the news stories covered by each channel, calculates how much time is devoted to them and analyses references to political parties and the main political leaders, as well as the tone of the coverage.

The project research and development have been carried out by Manuel Lleonart, researcher at the Department of Economics of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, and Luis Menéndez, from the University of Barcelona. The project aims to bring academic research closer to the public and to foster a more critical and informed understanding of the media. It also intends to create a database that allows for the study of the evolution of media coverage over time, especially during election periods, and to provide objective and systematic data to professionals and researchers.

SMM studies the news bulletins of the five main channels in Spain: La 1, Antena 3, Cuatro, Telecinco and laSexta. It does so using artificial intelligence, first by obtaining a detailed transcription of the news bulletins. Next, a large language model (LLM) divides the text into stories, determines their duration and generates a summary.

“In the first analysis, the model tells us what is being discussed and what is not. The big improvement is that the artificial intelligence we use is trained to understand the message and identify indirect references, for example, when the term “the Government” is used to refer to talk a specific political party,” explains Manuel Lleonart. From there, the system compares the topics covered and the time devoted to each by two or more television channels.

Analysis of the agenda and tone of the news

One of the platform’s indicators is coverage difference, which measures the extent to which channels distribute news time differently among the same topics. It is represented on a scale from 0 to 100: a value closer to 0 indicates that the choice of news is similar, whereas a value close to 100 reflects very different agendas. This particular indicator takes into account the topics covered in the news item and the time devoted to them, but not journalistic neutrality.

The portal also estimates the tone of the information relating to each party on a scale from -1 to +1, according to whether it is unfavourable (-1), balanced (0) or favourable (+1). The language model analyses the text of each news item and the duration of the segments without knowing which channel broadcast it.

“The results is treated as relative,” notes Lleonart, “they are not used to say whether a channel is more for or against in absolute terms, but rather they are compared with those from the other television channels.” In terms of the tone, the system is still being improved because it still does not have the error analysis that the researchers would like it to have.

Spanish Media Monitor already publishes specific results. For example, in the weeks of 14 to 20 September and 21 to 27 September, news about housing rose from 3.6% to 45.2% of the total news time across the five channels analysed as a whole. This increase coincides with the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal on 23 September and the social and political repercussions it had.

Another example is the Urda railway accident, which placed infrastructure at the centre of the news agenda between 28 October and 1 November. During this period, news on this issue accounted for 67% of the news time on the five channels analysed. The coverage was predominantly informative, without explicit partisan commentary, and produced tone index values of close to zero.

The project has analysed more than 200 news bulletins and identified over 5,600 news items since 7 September 2026. The call for a general election on 29 November, announced on 5 October, has accelerated the launch of the platform. The researchers’ objective is to continue feeding the portal with data beyond the election and to expand it to regional television channels, an option that would require improved automatic translation capabilities and sufficient resources to process the data.

Bibliographic reference: Menéndez, L., & Lleonart-Anguix, M. (2025). Spanish Media Monitor (SMM) political TV news coverage. https://www.mediamonitor.es