Bad News
Science has shown a bias in the way the press covers unemployment depending on what political party is in the presidential office.
We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit. We investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president’s political affiliation. We find evidence that newspapers with pro-Democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern. This result is not driven by the partisanship of readers. There is on the contrary no evidence of a partisan bias — or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement policy — for stories on inflation, budget deficit or trade deficit.
Like global warming it has to be true.
December 10th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
“political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade”
Last decade… a ten-year time period with exactly one president in each of the two groups? That’s a rather bad experimental design. Maybe newspapers just like Clinton more than Bush for some reason other than party affiliation. Maybe during the late ninties unemployment was assumed to be less of an issue because of rampant techno-optimism. There are plenty of alternative explanations, and I’d like to see the evidence that partisan bias is the most likely one - for example, by extending the study to more than two presidents.
Now, I know what you are going to say: there are alternative explanations for global warming as well, that don’t relate to human activity. Absolutely correct! I would much rather discuss the relative plausibility of each of these explanations, rather than entertaining an argument about global warming that amounts to a genetic logical fallacy (appeal to motive).