Teachingmedia

When it comes to slant, newspaper readers rule

In a fascinating study last year, University of Chicago researchers Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro built a statistical construct to study the forces that determine political content in the news. What they learned is that readers, not owners, play the largest role in determining the slant of newspapers. Consumer political attitudes were found to be responsible for about 20 per cent of the variation in slant. Nothing else came close.

In their study, What Drives Media Slant, the researchers examined partisan phrases used by members of the U.S. Congress in the 2005 Congressional Record, identified 1,000 used more frequently by one party over the other, and then indexed 400 daily newspapers according to how closely the use of phrases in political news coverage resembled the phrases in the speech of Republicans or Democrats.

For example, "tax relief" and "global war on terror" were identified as Republican; "tax break for the wealthy" and "war in Iraq" were deemed Democrat. From a Canadian perspective, of course, both U.S. parties lean to the right of the federal Conservatives, but that is not germane to the veracity of the study's findings.

The researchers applied their index to measure the impact of market forces on slant. Using zip-code data on newspaper circulation, they established that newspapers with a right-wing slant, not surprisingly, circulated more in heavily Republican zip codes. With this information, they were able to compute the slant that would maximize readership for each paper and estimated that even a small deviation from what they describe as the profit-maximizing slant would result in a loss of circulation of 3.4 per cent. Indeed, an owner would have to be prepared to pay between 68 cents US and $4.20 per reader per year to reduce the gap between the actual slant to a preferred slant by one standard deviation.