We 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. 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 not driven by the partisanship of readers. There is on the contrary no evidence of a partisan bias -- or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement policy -- for stories on inflation, budget deficit or trade deficit.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
13378.
Length: Date of creation: Sep 2007 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13378
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Find related papers by JEL classification: D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Models of Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior D78 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Positive Analysis of Policy-Making and Implementation L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media
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Jeffrey Milyo & Tim Groseclose, 2005.
"A Measure of Media Bias,"
Working Papers
0501, Department of Economics, University of Missouri, revised 25 Aug 2005.
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