What Drives Demand for Media Slant?
54 Pages Posted: 31 Jul 2017 Last revised: 14 Oct 2018
Date Written: July 5, 2018
Abstract
We conduct within-outlet, within-topic analysis of the relationship between partisan congeniality of news and news demand. We study ``horse race'' news on the 2012 and 2016 US presidential campaigns from six major online outlets, and data from incentivized surveys on news on the winners of presidential campaign debates. We find some evidence of higher demand for more congenial stories (within-outlet-topic), and some evidence of higher demand for more \emph{uncongenial} stories. We argue the former evidence is most consistent with psychological theories of demand for slant, and the latter is most consistent with the trust theory. We also obtain evidence of systematically congenial outlet-level horse race slant, arguably consistent with both the psychology and trust theories, but inconsistent with the instrumental value theory.
Keywords: Media Bias, Media Slant, Horse Race News, Presidential Debate News, Confirmation Bias, Cognitive Dissonance, Polarization
JEL Classification: D72, D83
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
