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How Partisan is the Press? Multiple Measures of Media Slant

Author

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  • 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.
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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
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    Cited by:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. Garz, Marcel & Szucs, Ferenc, 2023. "Algorithmic selection and supply of political news on Facebook," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    5. Louis Abraham & Charles Arnal & Antoine Marie, 2025. "Prompt selection matters: enhancing text annotations for social sciences with large language models," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 8(3), pages 1-20, August.
    6. Sendhil Mullainathan & Andrei Shleifer, 2005. "The Market for News," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(4), pages 1031-1053, September.

    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

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