US: Slant of media driven by audience

Posted by Jodie Hopperton on December 8, 2006 at 12:20 PM

A new study in the US finds that media slant is driven by audience rather than politics or ownership. This is an age old dilemma for newsrooms – should editorial be tailored to what readers want to hear?

The study written by two University of Chicago economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro is entitled 'What drives media slant? Evidence from US daily newspapers'. They analysed the words and phrases of politicians from the 2005 US Congressional Record to find the 1000 most used expressions of the year. They then analysed news coverage in 417 newspapers in the US, accounting for about 70% of total newspaper circulation.

Papers like The Washington Times used Republican phrases while papers like The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe used Democratic ones. Using a comparison of circulation data and the ratio of Democratic v Republican contributions, they discovered that circulation was strongly related to whether the
newspaper matched the readers' own ideology.

This is likely to be intrinsically related to the fact that nowadays, circulation is everything and newspapers need to be as profitable as possible. Editors are pushed to give their readers what they want, in the language they want it.

Source: The European Journalism and The International Herald Tribune