Is the Media Really Biased?

Newspapers customize their news to match the beliefs of their customers, but not their owners, said Jesse Shapiro, assistant professor of economics. “Consumers gravitate to like-minded news sources, creating a nontrivial economic incentive for news outlets that target their content to suit the interests of their customers,” Shapiro said during a Becker Brown Bag Series, sponsored by the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory, at Harper Center on April 16. “There does not seem to be any evidence that owners are willing to pay to do something they prefer, but that their customers don’t want.”

Shapiro and Matthew Gentzkow, assistant professor of economics and the John Huizinga Faculty Fellow, made these discoveries by creating their own statistical measure of political slant and applying it to news stories in 400 daily newspapers, or about 70 percent of such circulation in the United States, Shapiro said. In a computerized review of the Congressional Record, they identified political phrases associated with Republicans or Democrats, he said.

By searching for about 1,000 of such phrases in daily newspapers, Shapiro and Gentzkow were able to classify newspapers as varying degrees of liberal or conservative, Shapiro said. “We used a statistical model to ask, ‘If this newspaper were a Congressperson, how Democratic or Republican would that Congressperson be?’” he said.

The most extreme comparison they discovered was between the Washington Post and the Washington Times, Shapiro said. For example, when same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts, the Washington Post’s headline read, “Same-sex couples line up early for marriage made in Massachusetts.” The Washington Times headline read, “Homosexuals ‘marry’ in Massachusetts.”

“The data index looks consistent with the hypothesis that news outlets are trying to customize their news to match the prior beliefs of their customers. For example, if you look at the share of the time a newspaper uses the Republican phrase ‘death tax’ to the Democratic phrase ‘estate tax,’ you find it is much greater in conservative than liberal places.”

Shapiro successfully linked media demand to broader economic forces, which many people tend to disregard when thinking about media, second-year student Steve Tuohy said. “The Becker Center tries to look at a lot of tough issues from a pricing perspective and an economic perspective ,” Tuohy said. “We can bring that same perspective into most business decisions, so this ties the media into day-to-day business concerns.”

--Phil Rockrohr