Lean Left? Lean Right? News Media May Take Their Cues From Customers

LEAN LEFT? LEAN RIGHT? NEWS MEDIA MAY TAKE THEIR CUES FROM CUSTOMERS
[SOURCE: New York Times, AUTHOR: Austan Goolsbee]
Most people expect spin from politicians. When they perceive partisan slant in the news itself, they typically interpret it as evidence of underlying bias by reporters or media owners. But one of the most interesting things coming out of research on the economics of the media industry has been the notion that media slant may simply reflect business rather than politics. New research by two University of Chicago economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, entitled “What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers” compiles some compelling and altogether unusual data to answer the question. Papers like The Washington Times or The Deseret Morning News of Salt Lake City used Republican phrases while papers like The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe used Democratic ones. But more important, once the authors had this measure, they showed that the main driver of any slant was the newspaper’s audience, not bias by the newspaper’s owner. A comparison of circulation data (per capita) to the ratio of Republican to Democratic campaign contributions by ZIP code showed that circulation was strongly related to whether the newspaper matched the readers’ own ideology. Their measure indicates that The Los Angeles Times, for example, is a liberal paper. Its circulation suffers in Southern California ZIP codes where donations to Republicans are especially high. The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Dr. Shapiro put it in an interview, “The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers’ demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/07/business/media/07scene.html
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* See the research www.nber.org/papers/w12707.pdf