What Drives Media Bias?

Posted on February 28, 2010
Filed Under Sideblog | 2 Comments

What drives media bias? After doing the analysis it appears ownership has little to do with it but the audience of buyers has everything to do with it.

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Comments

2 Responses to “What Drives Media Bias?”

I distrust these results for the following reason: Of these papers that I have read, most national and international news comes from Reuters and AP. They typically provide a single version (slant) of a story, newspapers don’t get to chose. Any slant would be in the stories the editors chose to carry or not, and the local news and op-ed page.

I don’t how this comes from the data:
“Gentzkow and Shapiro conclude that papers to some degree are just giving their readers what the readers want so as to maximize the newspapers’ profits.”

I’m sure to some degree that’s true, but how does that come from the data presented? It’s my experince that most households decide whether to buy or not the local paper – usually for comics, local info, sports. In most markets there isn’t a choice of buying a paper with this slant or the other slant.

How the owners’ politics were determined isn’t described. How does one go about ranking the politics of Acme news corp anyway? Do they repeat congressional phrases in their corporate communications?

So all in all, I don’t think one can say much about newspapers and politics from this. The blog post infers too much knowledge from very little information.

I assume this is ignoring press resources like AP but focusing in on local news. Although local newspapers often modify the AP or Reuters feeds. (I actually think Reuters itself is often much more biased than the AP – but maybe that’s just me)

I think the conclusions about slant focusing on markets is that the bias (whatever their methodological faults) tends to favor the community. So papers in conservative districts favor conservatism.

The bigger question are papers with a focus outside their immediate area (say the Washington Post, New York Times or to a lesser extent the LA Times) or papers without a narrow geographic area (USA Today, Christian Science Monitor, etc.)

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