The topic of media bias comes up regularly on Times & Seasons.<\/p>\n
It was the focus of one of Matt’s recent posts<\/a>. It was part of the discussion of my post on the elections in Iraq<\/a>. Kaimi had an entire post<\/a> devoted to the subject last summer. Now for some data: a London School of Economics Ph.D candidate, Riccardo Puglisi, has studied a dataset of news from the New York Times, from 1946 to 1994, and he found:<\/p>\n [T]he New York Times has a Democratic partisanship, with some watchdog aspects, in that during the presidential campaign it systematically gives more emphasis to Democratic topics, but only so when the incumbent President is a Republican. This set of Democratic topics comprises stories about civil rights, health care, labor and employment, and social welfare.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You can find his paper here<\/a>.<\/p>\n If you have read this far, you might also be interested in this paper<\/a> by John Lott and Kevin Hassett entitled “Is Newspaper Coverage of Economic Events Politically Biased?” Well, you probably already know the answer to that question, given the authors: “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.”<\/p>\n Of course, if you believe what Hugh Hewitt writes in his new book Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World<\/em><\/a>, you won’t be worried because blogs are toppling old media anyway. (For my not-very-favorable take on Hewitt’s book, go here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n