Measuring partisan media bias in US newscasts from 2001 to 2012

Lea Bernhardt, Ralf Dewenter and Tobias Thomas

European Journal of Political Economy, 2023, vol. 78, issue C

Abstract: This paper investigates the positioning in political news coverage of the big four US newscasts, ABC News, CBS News, FOX News and NBC News, as well as how they alter their positions when president Barack Obama took over from George W. Bush. Our empirical analysis is based on the tonality of their political coverage using more than 815,000 news items on Democrats and Republicans from 2001 through 2012. Using the Political Coverage Index (PCI), we find evidence for partisan and biased news coverage across all of the newscasts, with a general tendency of ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News to be slightly more critical of the Republicans, and of FOX News with a clear tendency to be more critical of Democrats. Moreover, and even more interesting, two of the newscasts – CBS News and NBC News – changed their political coverage such that it became more conservative when Democrat Barack Obama became president. This effect becomes even more pronounced when observations from election campaign periods are dropped. We interpret these results as evidence for a watchdog-like anti-government bias on the part of the observed newscasts. In contrast, FOX News remains Democrat-critical independent of who is in office and can be seen as partisan from this perspective. The results are confirmed when controlling for differences in reporting rates between the parties and the administrations using interaction terms.

Keywords: Political coverage index; Government bias; Tonality; Media capture; US newscasts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 D72 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268023000046
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Measuring partisan media bias in US Newscasts from 2001-2012 (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:78:y:2023:i:c:s0176268023000046

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2023.102360

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().