Partisan bias in economic news: Evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of U.S. newspapers☆

TLDR: This article examined the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit.

About: This article is published in Journal of Public Economics.The article was published on 2011-10-01 and is currently open access. It has received 206 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Newspaper & Media bias.

Figures

Table 2: summary statistics, 1996-2005

Fig. 2: Average circulation and endorsement partisanship

Fig. 1: Histogram of the endorsement propensity: 1992-2005

Table 3: Partisan Bias in the Coverage of Economic Issues

Fig. 6: Endorsement policy and partisan coverage of trade deficit

Table 6: Unemployment News: Demand-driven coverage?

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions mentioned in the paper "Partisan bias in economic news: evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of u.s. newspapers" ?

The authors study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U. S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. The authors investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president ’ s political affiliation. The authors. The authors find evidence that newspapers with proDemocratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern. 

Q2. What are the future works mentioned in the paper "Partisan bias in economic news: evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of u.s. newspapers" ?

This allows to readily extend the dataset and type of analysis in several directions. First, it would be worthwhile to try and gather data on additional newspapers for the early 90s and late 80s, in order to shed some further light on the robustness of their results with respect to the time-window being considered. Moreover, historical electronic archives like ProQuest can be used to construct long time series on the coverage of economic issues by a handful of newspapers. 30 28Unfortunately, the authors can not separate the government deficit from other mentions about government spending being too high. 

Q3. How can the authors use the data to build long time series on economic issues?

historical electronic archives like ProQuest can be used to construct long time series on the coverage of economic issues by a handful of newspapers. 

Q4. What is the harmful behavior by the media?

The exploitation of agenda-setting power is potentially one of the most harmful behaviors by news media, especially if they use this power to suppress information. 

Q5. What are the two agencies that can publish lagged values of macroeconomic variables?

The Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (or any statistical agency assigned to similar tasks) can only publish lagged values of macroeconomic variables. 

Q6. What is the theory of agenda setting?

4The theory of agenda setting is built around the idea that mass media can influence the importance attached to different issues by readers and viewers. 

Q7. What is the way to disentangle the direction of causality?

Since it remains difficult to disentangle the direction of causality with data whose relevant variation is ultimately cross-sectional, a possible empirical strategy consists in using time series data and exploit some (possibly) exogenous shock in the partisanship of readers across regions, or in the editorial position of newspapers, as triggered by a change in ownership or management. 

Q8. How many of these issues are correlated with the political partisanship of potential readers?

If the political partisanship of potential readers in the area where a newspaper sells is positively correlated with its endorsement policy, then the less intense coverage of high unemployment by Democratic-leaning newspapers under a Democratic president could be driven by the fact that the local unemployment rate is lower in those areas where the newspapers are sold. 

Q9. How do they find that newspapers gave a more favorable coverage to endorsed candidates?

Through human-based content analysis they code the tone of the articles and find that newspapers systematically gave a more favorable coverage to endorsed incumbents.