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Selective Sharing of News Items and the Political Position of News Outlets

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  • Julian Freitag
  • Anna Kerkhof
  • Johannes Münster

Abstract

We present a new measure for the political position of news outlets based on politicians' selective sharing of news items. Politicians predominantly share news items that are in line with their political position, hence, one can infer the political position of news outlets from the politicians' revealed preferences over news items. We apply our measure to twelve major German media outlets by analyzing tweets of German Members of Parliament (MPs) on Twitter. For each news outlet under consideration, we compute the correlation between the political position of the seven parties in the 19th German Bundestag and their MPs' relative number of Twitter referrals to that outlet. We find that three outlets are positioned on the left, and two of them are positioned on the right. Several robustness checks support our results. We also apply our procedure to nine major media outlets from the USA and find that two outlets are positioned on the right, five are positioned on the left of the political spectrum.

Suggested Citation

  • Julian Freitag & Anna Kerkhof & Johannes Münster, 2021. "Selective Sharing of News Items and the Political Position of News Outlets," CESifo Working Paper Series 8943, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8943
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    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8943.pdf
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    Cited by:

    1. Razi Farukh & Matthias Heinz & Anna Kerkhof & Heiner Schumacher, 2023. "Attitudes to Migration and the Market for News," CESifo Working Paper Series 10605, CESifo.
    2. Ximeng Fang & Sven Heuser & Lasse S. Stötzer, 2023. "How In-Person Conversations Shape Political Polarization: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Nationwide Initiative," ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series 270, University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany.
    3. Razi Farukh & Matthias Heinz & Anna Kerkhof & Heiner Schumacher, 2023. "Attitudes to Migration and the Market for News," ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series 248, University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany.
    4. Sylvain Dejean & Marianne Lumeau & Stéphanie Peltier, 2021. "Partisan selective exposure in news consumption," Working Papers hal-03295625, HAL.
    5. Dejean, Sylvain & Lumeau, Marianne & Peltier, Stéphanie, 2022. "Partisan selective exposure in news consumption," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 60(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    political media bias; political position; selective sharing; social media; Twitter;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H41 - Public Economics - - Publicly Provided Goods - - - Public Goods
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media
    • L86 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Information and Internet Services; Computer Software
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State

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