What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers
构建了一个衡量新闻媒体语言与国会共和党或民主党相似度的倾向指数，发现读者偏好立场一致的新闻，企业对此强烈响应，消费者偏好解释了约20%的倾向差异，而所有者身份影响较小。
We construct a new index of media slant that measures the similarity of a news outlet's language to that of a congressional Republican or Democrat. We estimate a model of newspaper demand that incorporates slant explicitly, estimate the slant that would be chosen if newspapers independently maximized their own profits, and compare these profit-maximizing points with firms' actual choices. We find that readers have an economically significant preference for like-minded news. Firms respond strongly to consumer preferences, which account for roughly 20 percent of the variation in measured slant in our sample. By contrast, the identity of a newspaper's owner explains far less of the variation in slant. Copyright 2010 The Econometric Society.