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What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers

Matthew Gentzkow, +1 more
- 01 Jan 2010 - 
- Vol. 78, Iss: 1, pp 35-71
TLDR
The authors construct a new index of media slant that measures the similarity of a news outlet's language to that of a congressional Republican or Democrat, and find that readers have an economically significant preference for like-minded news.
Abstract
We construct a new index of media slant that measures the similarity of a news outlet's language to that of a congressional Republican or Democrat. We estimate a model of newspaper demand that incorporates slant explicitly, estimate the slant that would be chosen if newspapers independently maximized their own profits, and compare these profit-maximizing points with firms' actual choices. We find that readers have an economically significant preference for like-minded news. Firms respond strongly to consumer preferences, which account for roughly 20 percent of the variation in measured slant in our sample. By contrast, the identity of a newspaper's owner explains far less of the variation in slant.

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Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty

TL;DR: The authors developed a new index of economic policy uncertainty based on newspaper coverage frequency and found that policy uncertainty spikes near tight presidential elections, Gulf Wars I and II, the 9/11 attacks, the failure of Lehman Brothers, the 2011 debt ceiling dispute and other major battles over fiscal policy.
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Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook

TL;DR: Examination of the news that millions of Facebook users' peers shared, what information these users were presented with, and what they ultimately consumed found that friends shared substantially less cross-cutting news from sources aligned with an opposing ideology.
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Filter Bubbles, Echo Chambers, and Online News Consumption

TL;DR: For instance, this paper found that social networks and search engines are associated with an increase in the mean ideological distance between individuals, and that the magnitude of the effects is relatively modest, while also finding that the vast majority of online news consumption is accounted for by individuals simply visiting the home pages of their favorite, typically mainstream, news outlets.
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Media Coverage and the Cross‐section of Stock Returns

Lily H. Fang, +1 more
- 01 Oct 2009 - 
TL;DR: The authors investigated the cross-sectional relation between media coverage and expected stock returns and found that stocks with no media coverage earn higher returns than stocks with high media coverage even after controlling for well-known risk factors.
Journal ArticleDOI

Textual Analysis in Accounting and Finance: A Survey

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors describe the nuances of the textual analysis and some of the tripwires in implementation and highlight the contemporary textual analysis literature and highlight areas of future research.
References
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Book

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

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Is All That Talk Just Noise? The Information Content of Internet Stock Message Boards

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