Partisan bias in economic news: Evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of US newspapers

• 成果类型: Article; Proceedings Paper
• 署名作者: Larcinese, Valentino; Puglisi, Riccardo; Snyder, James M., Jr.
• 署名单位: University of Pavia; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science; Harvard University; Harvard University; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2011.04.006
• 发表日期: 2011
• 页码: 1178-1189
• 关键词: news; Mass media; INFORMATION; media bias

摘要

We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the 1996-2005 period. Our purpose is to examine 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. We 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. We find evidence that newspapers with pro-Democratic 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. This result is robust to controlling for the partisanship of readers. We find similar but less robust results for the trade deficit. We also find some evidence that newspapers cater to the partisan tastes of readers in the coverage of the budget deficit. We find no evidence of a partisan bias - or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement or reader partisanship - for stories on inflation. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.