Journalist Ideology and the Production of News: Evidence from Movers
52 Pages Posted: 20 Dec 2022
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
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