Study: Pro-Dem Papers Cover Unemployment Issues More When Sitting Prez Is Republican

Freakonomics Blog:

As Levitt has noted in the past, media bias is a hot topic among some economists. Typically the bias is reflected in a paper's reporting (as Dubner pointed out here). But can newspapers also influence public opinion based on their coverage of economic matters?

That's the question addressed in the working paper "Partisan Bias in Economic News: Evidence on the Agenda-Setting Behavior of U.S. Newspapers," by Valentino Larcinese, a government professor at the London School of Economics; Riccardo Puglisi, a political science professor at M.I.T.; and James Snyder, an M.I.T. economist. Studying a "large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade," they identified each paper as liberal or conservative based on its endorsement policy. Then they examined the total number of articles each publication ran on economic issues like unemployment, inflation, trade deficits and the federal budget.

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