Journal
ECONOMETRICA
Volume 78, Issue 1, Pages 35-71Publisher
WILEY-BLACKWELL
DOI: 10.3982/ECTA7195
Keywords
Bias; text categorization; media ownership
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [SES-0617658]
- Stigler Center for the Study of the State and the Economy
- Initiative on Global Markets
- Centel Foundation
- University of Chicago Booth School of Business
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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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