Partisan bias in economic news: Evidence on the agenda-setting behavior of U.S. newspapers

We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the 1996–2005 period. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit. We investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president's political affiliation. We find evidence that newspapers with pro-Democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern. This result is robust to controlling for the partisanship of readers. We find similar but less robust results for the trade deficit. We also find some evidence that newspapers cater to the partisan tastes of readers in the coverage of the budget deficit. We find no evidence of a partisan bias – or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement or reader partisanship – for stories on inflation.

Research highlights
► We study the coverage of economic issues by a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the 1996-2005 period.
► We check whether there is any correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers and the coverage of economic news.
► Democratic newspapers cover more high unemployment under a Republican president than under a Democrat.
► The opposite holds for Republican outlets. Newspapers cater to readers' partisan tastes when covering the budget decit.
► We also analyse as a case study the succession of Otis Chandler as publisher of the Los Angeles Times during the early '60s.