What Derives Media Slant?

The research focuses on the economic forces that cause the newspaper to lean in a certain direction. It
aims to find, to what extent media content is biased and what are the reasons behind it. The authors
have come up with a way to measure the political orientation of the media outlet. They covered a large
number of media outlets/newspapers and looked over its content for a large period. Manually the task
would have been very tedious. Therefore, they developed an automated way to detect the direction of
the lean/slant.

They take the phrases of the congress members by searching through the congressional record of 2005.
With the help of their search technique, they identify which phrase is used more frequently by one party
rather than the other. For instance when it comes to inheritance tax the republicans call it a "death tax",
whereas the democrats call it a "estate tax". Similarly Iraq war is referred by the republicans as "war on
terror" where as "war on Iraq" by the democrats. Given these correlation in the speech context, what
the author does is to search for the Local Newspapers for the similar phrases. They want to see if a
newspaper was a politician how would it sound like. The newspaper that uses the phrases of a
republican congressional representative a lot are considered relatively to the left and the newspaper
that used the phrases of a democratic congressional representative a lot are considered relatively to the
left. With their index, they match the phrases and newspaper to the speeches of either a democrat or a
republican. Once this classification is done, they test their method to generate empirical results.

Main Findings
 The language of the newspaper is very much close to a left leaning member of the congress. A
typical newspaper somewhat lean towards left.
 The political slant is quite close to the profit maximizing point for the newspaper. The readers of
the newspaper are more likely to be found in the left leaning area.
 This paper does not prove that the political slant of the newspaper is due to the profit
maximization but it shows that we cannot reject the hypothesis that it might be due to profit
maximization.
 Findings suggest that the ownership of the newspaper does not matter for predicting the
political slant of the newspaper. For example, same owner might run newspapers of different
slants.
 To some extent there might be a common slant of co-owned papers by the same family or
corporation
 Under one specification, ownership predicts about 2% of the slant. There is a possibility the
extent to which we find political slant in the newspaper is driven by what the reader wants to
hear/read (their own ideology) .
 There is no difference in the amount of catering to reader's preferences, whether we look at a
publically held firm or private. One might think a privately held newspaper, controlled by a
family could mold the paper as per their ideology but the publically held corporation needs to
satisfy their shareholders for profit maximization. The authors believe this distinction does not
 matter when there is no difference between a private and a public firm. When there is no
difference between the two, they both slant in direction that maximizes profit.
 The slant of the newspaper is unrelated to the political contribution of the owner and manager
of the newspaper. This suggests that whatever slant we find comes from what readers are
demanding.

Conclusion
 We must not rule out the assumption of profit maximization. If we see some slant, then it may
be coming from the readers and not the owners.
 Newspapers respond to the incentives. This paper somehow provides some evidence for a
relatively passive view of what newspapers are about.
 Ownership diversification is not required for the ideological diversification of the news.
Ownership diversification is often characterized as a regulatory issue. Slant is driven by what
readers want to read, so who owns the newspaper and how many outlets are there, is not
important.