Journalist Ideology and the Production of News: Evidence from Movers

52 Pages Posted: 20 Dec 2022

See all articles by Levi Boxell

Levi Boxell

Independent

Jacob Conway

University of Chicago - Booth School of Business

Date Written: December 6, 2022

Abstract

What role do journalists play in determining the political slant of the news they produce? We develop a model where journalists and newspaper outlets contract over both slant and wages. The model implies a set of conditions under which we can consistently estimate the role of journalist preferences in driving the observed variation in slant across outlets by leveraging journalist transitions between outlets. To measure slant, we train a transformer-based, machine learning model using articles tweeted by politicians and apply it to a full-text database of 20+ million newspaper articles published in the US between 2013 and 2018. Applying our model-informed estimators to the data, our estimates (a) reject the hypothesis that journalists have zero ideological preferences over the content they produce and (b) imply that 16 percent of observed variation in slant across outlets can be explained by journalist preferences.

Keywords: Media Bias, Slant, Journalists, Movers Event Study

JEL Classification: D22, J32, J44, L82

Suggested Citation

Boxell, Levi and Conway, Jacob, Journalist Ideology and the Production of News: Evidence from Movers (December 6, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4295587 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4295587

Levi Boxell

Independent ( email )

Jacob Conway (Contact Author)

University of Chicago - Booth School of Business ( email )

5807 S. Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
United States

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