IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecorec/v88y2012i280p127-147.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How Partisan is the Press? Multiple Measures of Media Slant

Author

Listed:
  • JOSHUA S. GANS
  • ANDREW LEIGH

Abstract

We employ several different approaches to estimate the political position of Australian media outlets, relative to federal parliamentarians. First, we use parliamentary mentions to code over 100 public intellectuals on a left-right scale. We then estimate slant by using the number of mentions that each public intellectual receives in each media outlet. Second, we have independent raters separately code front-page election stories and headlines. Third, we tabulate the number of electoral endorsements that newspapers give to each side of politics in federal elections. Overall, we find that the Australian media are quite centrist, with very few outlets being statistically distinguishable from the middle of Australian politics. It is possible that this is due to the lack of competition in the Australian media market. To the extent that we can separate content slant from editorial slant, we find some evidence that editors are more partisan than journalists.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Joshua S. Gans & Andrew Leigh, 2012. "How Partisan is the Press? Multiple Measures of Media Slant," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 88(280), pages 127-147, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ecorec:v:88:y:2012:i:280:p:127-147
    DOI: j.1475-4932.2011.00782.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1475-4932.2011.00782.x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/j.1475-4932.2011.00782.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Puglisi Riccardo, 2011. "Being The New York Times: the Political Behaviour of a Newspaper," The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, De Gruyter, vol. 11(1), pages 1-34, April.
    2. Larcinese, Valentino & Puglisi, Riccardo & Snyder Jr., James M., 2011. "Partisan bias in economic news: Evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of U.S. newspapers," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 95(9-10), pages 1178-1189, October.
    3. Alex Millmow, 2005. "Australian economics in the twentieth century," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 29(6), pages 1011-1026, November.
    4. Campante, Filipe R. & Hojman, Daniel A., 2013. "Media and polarization," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 100(C), pages 79-92.
    5. Baron, David P., 2004. "Persistent Media Bias," Research Papers 1845r, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    6. Ruben Durante & Brian Knight, 2012. "Partisan Control, Media Bias, And Viewer Responses: Evidence From Berlusconi'S Italy," Journal of the European Economic Association, European Economic Association, vol. 10(3), pages 451-481, May.
    7. Sendhil Mullainathan & Andrei Shleifer, 2005. "The Market for News," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1031-1053, September.
    8. Marco GAMBARO & Riccardo PUGLISI, 2009. "What do ads buy? Daily coverage of listed companies on the Italian press," Departmental Working Papers 2009-36, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    9. Tim Groseclose & Jeffrey Milyo, 2005. "A Measure of Media Bias," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 120(4), pages 1191-1237.
    10. Ho, Daniel E. & Quinn, Kevin M., 2008. "Measuring Explicit Political Positions of Media," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 3(4), pages 353-377, December.
    11. Jonathan Reuter & Eric Zitzewitz, 2006. "Do Ads Influence Editors? Advertising and Bias in the Financial Media," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 121(1), pages 197-227.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Sendhil Mullainathan & Andrei Shleifer, 2005. "The Market for News," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1031-1053, September.
    2. Rodrigo Taborda, 2013. "Bias in Economic News: The Reporting of Nominal Exchange Rate Behavior in Colombia," Economía Journal, The Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association - LACEA, vol. 0(Fall 2013), pages 103-153, August.
    3. Garz, Marcel & Szucs, Ferenc, 2023. "Algorithmic selection and supply of political news on Facebook," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    4. Jeffrey Cohen & Yuan Ding & Cédric Lesage & Hervé Stolowy, 2017. "Media Bias and the Persistence of the Expectation Gap: An Analysis of Press Articles on Corporate Fraud," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 144(3), pages 637-659, September.
    5. Hock Thye Chan, 2018. "What is the Problem Represented to Be: A Research Methodology forAnalysing Australias Skilled Migration Policy," International Journal of Business and Economic Affairs (IJBEA), Sana N. Maswadeh, vol. 3(1), pages 21-32.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Strömberg, David & Prat, Andrea, 2011. "The Political Economy of Mass Media," CEPR Discussion Papers 8246, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Friebel, Guido & Heinz, Matthias, 2014. "Media slant against foreign owners: Downsizing," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 97-106.
    3. Petrova, Maria, 2012. "Mass media and special interest groups," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 84(1), pages 17-38.
    4. Maria Battaggion & Alessandro Vaglio, 2015. "Watchdogs, Platforms and Audience: An Economic Perspective on Media Markets," Atlantic Economic Journal, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 43(2), pages 209-228, June.
    5. Rafael Di Tella & Ignacio Franceschelli, 2011. "Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 3(4), pages 119-151, October.
    6. Piolatto, Amedeo & Schuett, Florian, 2015. "Media competition and electoral politics," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 80-93.
    7. Sobbrio, Francesco, 2014. "Citizen-editors' endogenous information acquisition and news accuracy," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 43-53.
    8. David Strömberg, 2015. "Media and Politics," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 7(1), pages 173-205, August.
    9. Gambaro, Marco & Puglisi, Riccardo, 2015. "What do ads buy? Daily coverage of listed companies on the Italian press," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 41-57.
    10. Stefano DellaVigna & Ruben Durante & Brian Knight & Eliana La Ferrara, 2016. "Market-Based Lobbying: Evidence from Advertising Spending in Italy," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 8(1), pages 224-256, January.
    11. Bernhardt, Lea & Dewenter, Ralf & Thomas, Tobias, 2020. "Measuring partisan media bias in US Newscasts from 2001-2012," Working Paper 183/2020, Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, revised 15 Nov 2022.
    12. Redlicki, B., 2017. "Spreading Lies," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 1747, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    13. Giovanni Facchini & Anna Maria Mayda & Riccardo Puglisi, 2017. "Illegal immigration and media exposure: evidence on individual attitudes," IZA Journal of Migration and Development, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 7(1), pages 1-36, December.
    14. Jetter, Michael, 2017. "Terrorism and the Media: The Effect of US Television Coverage on Al-Qaeda Attacks," IZA Discussion Papers 10708, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    15. Bernhardt, Lea & Dewenter, Ralf & Thomas, Tobias, 2023. "Measuring partisan media bias in US newscasts from 2001 to 2012," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 78(C).
    16. Michael Jetter, 2017. "Mediated Terrorism: US News and Al-Qaeda Attacks," CESifo Working Paper Series 6804, CESifo.
    17. Inés Moreno de Barreda & Gilat Levy & Ronny Razin, 2017. "Persuasion with Correlation Neglect: Media Power via Correlation of News Content," Economics Series Working Papers 836, University of Oxford, Department of Economics.
    18. Garcia Pires, Armando J., 2014. "Media diversity, advertising, and adaptation of news to readers’ political preferences," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 28(C), pages 28-38.
    19. Francesco Sobbrio, 2012. "A Citizen-Editors Model of News Media," RSCAS Working Papers 2012/61, European University Institute.
    20. Corneo, Giacomo, 2006. "Media capture in a democracy: The role of wealth concentration," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(1-2), pages 37-58, January.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ecorec:v:88:y:2012:i:280:p:127-147. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/esausea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.