Multidimensional media slant: complementarities in news reporting by US newspapers

Sandra García-Uribe

No 1817, Working Papers from Banco de España

Abstract: Are editors’ choices of front page news based on the potential complementarities between the news items? This paper studies front page choices made by editors of major newspapers in the US. I document that newspapers front pages are biased to certain combinations of news on top of biased to certain news. To identify my measures of bias, I exploit the variation in news relevance across different topics and days. To measure the news relevance I use lead news choices of other US mass media. As a consequence, my measures of bias are relative to the overall media bias. I also provide a reader-maximization model for front page decisions that I use to interpret the empirical biases of the newspaper as preferences of its population of target readers. From my estimation, I recover maps of complementarities among pairs of topics for each of the major US newspapers. I fi nd that complementarities between news contribute in a large portion to the probability that news on a topic appears in the front page.

Keywords: Media bias; discrete choice; complementarities; multiple products (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 C55 D22 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 81 pages
Date: 2018-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cul
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https://www.bde.es/f/webbde/SES/Secciones/Publicac ... 18/Files/dt1817e.pdf First version, June 2018 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Multidimensional media slant: Complementarities in news reporting by US newspapers (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bde:wpaper:1817

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