(ambient music) Narrator: When we think of cable channels such as Fox News or MSNBC, we expect a particular slant on what stories are chosen and how they are framed. Depending on our politics, we may praise these decisions as affirming our views, or criticize them as biased. Matthew Gentzkow seeks to understand why these differences among media outlets persist.
Matthew Gentzkow: What drives the choice of slant by media outlets? So you could think of two very different narratives. One is: the slant is driven by the political preferences of the owners of news outlets, or maybe by the editors, reporters. The other is: slant is chosen just to maximize profits, and ultimately therefore is driven by whatever the readers of the newspaper want to hear.
Narrator: The researchers examined the Congressional Record to determine which phrases Democratic and Republican speakers tend to use, then they used these standards to create a measure of political slant for each newspaper.
Matthew Gentzkow: Once we had these measures for each newspaper of their political positions, we could then apply standard tools from economics that we use in other domains to ask: What does the demand for this product look like. How strong is the preference of conservative readers to read conservatively slanted news, or for liberal readers to read liberally slanted news? And then to what extent are the newspapers responding to that in your choice?
So ultimately what we tried to do in that paper was kind of pull apart those things and say: Of the differences we see out there in the world, what share of that variation is coming from catering to consumer tastes? What share of it is coming from something to do with the owners? And the punch line is sort of it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the owners at all. It’s basically all explained, to the extent that we can explain it, by newspapers trying to sell newspapers, and ending up catering to the political views of their readers.
That doesn’t preclude a situation where the conservative newspapers are, in fact, run by conservative people. And the liberal newspapers are, in fact, run by liberal. So it’s like the newspaper down in Texas is gonna be conservative ’cause that’s what’s gonna maximize profits. Now, who is gonna choose to buy and run such a newspaper and live in Houston and be there? Chances are it might be somebody really conservative. So there’s a correlation out there that everybody can see. And I think it’s one of these cases of people get a little mixed up between correlation and causation.
I think we sort of show that the causation is ultimately coming from the economics side, but in fact, you still see the conservative things run by mostly conservatives and liberal things run by mostly liberals.
Narrator: People may worry that the more news is published online, the more we will segregate ourselves by what sources we read. It’s possible that we’re becoming more polarized in our choices, with conservatives reading only conservative sources, and liberals turning to liberal outlets.
Matthew Gentzkow: If you look at really conservative sites like rushlimbaugh.com, its viewership is almost all conservative. If you look at really liberal sites, their readership is almost all liberals.
If you look at where most news consumption happens, it’s not on those extreme sites. It’s on a bunch of big sites in the middle. So people go to cnn.com or they go to abc.com or they go to Yahoo News. And those are big sites that account for a lot of consumption that have pretty representative audiences, so a lot of conservatives and liberals are seeing the same thing.
You don’t need to think about it for that long to realize you should probably expect that the profit incentives at newspapers is gonna be at least one important driver of their content. And you also don’t need to think about it for very long to guess that the internet, like many other media that have come before it, is probably gonna be dominated by a small number of big, high quality sites that people kind of converge on. And if that’s gonna be true, that those are gonna tend to cluster toward the middle and appeal to a wide audience.
You have to remember, there’s always a tug of war between two forces in media markets. One is there are big incentives for politicians and political parties and other actors with political interests to try to shift and influence the content of the news. On the other hand, there are always market incentives in play, to varying degrees, that mean the more you do that, the more money the newspapers are gonna lose.
