Is Newspaper Coverage of Economic Events Politically Biased?: Reagan to Bush II

摘要: Accusations of political bias in the media are often made by members of both political parties, yet there have been few systematic studies of such bias to date. This paper develops an econometric technique to test for political bias in news reports that controls for the underlying character of the news reported. Because of the changing availability of the number of newspapers in Nexis/Lexis two sets of time are examined from 1991 to 2004 and from 1985 to 2004. Our results suggest that American newspapers tend to give more positive news coverage to the same economic news when Democrats are in the Presidency than for Republicans. The effect is even more pronounced when Republicans control both the presidency and the congress. Our results reject the claim that “reader diversity is a powerful force toward accuracy.” When all types of news are pooled into a single analysis, our results are highly significant …