Lean Left? Lean Right? News Media May Take Their Cues From Customers: Any politician will tell you that sometimes what we call things is the most political decision of all. Political consultants like Frank Luntz, a Republican, have become legendary for their way of spinning language to partisan advantage: ?death tax? instead of ?estate tax,? ?war on terror? instead of ?war in Iraq.? But most people expect spin from politicians. When they perceive partisan slant in the news itself, they typically interpret it as evidence of underlying bias by reporters or media owners.
But one of the most interesting things coming out of research on the economics of the media industry has been the notion that media slant may simply reflect business rather than politics.
New research by two University of Chicago economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, entitled ?What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers? (www.nber.org/papers/w12707.pdf) compiles some compelling and altogether unusual data to answer the question.
Dr. Gentzkow and Dr. Shapiro started in the world of the political. They parsed the words of politicians ? all the words ? from the 2005 Congressional Record. They found the 1,000 most partisan phrases uttered in the year. They measured this by comparing how frequently a phrase was used by one side or the other.
In 2005, phrases like ?death tax,? ?illegal aliens,? ?Terri Schiavo,? and ?nuclear power? came mostly from Republicans. Phrases like ?minimum wage,? ?public broadcasting,? ?middle class? and ?oil companies? came mostly from Democrats. Using those phrases, the two economists made a simple index of partisanship that comported nicely with standard measures like a politician?s score on the Americans for Democratic Action ideological scale.
The study then analyzed 417 newspapers in the United States (accounting for some 70 percent of total newspaper circulation) as if they were politicians. The researchers measured, for example, all the times in articles about Social Security that a newspaper referred to ?personal accounts? (Republican) or to ?private accounts? (Democratic). Their measure of partisan slant came only from the news coverage. They did not include anything from the editorial page.
The index matched most popular perceptions of newspaper partisanship.
