Does the Ideology of the Newsroom Affect the Provision of Media Slant?

Hassell, Hans J. G.; Miles, Matthew R.; Reuning, Kevin

doi:10.1080/10584609.2021.1986613

Cited by 10 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…Importantly, our measure opens the door to answering key questions in the social sciences. We envision that this measure can be particularly useful for studying the supply side of media environment—ranging from the dynamics of market competition to the ownership change to business pressures or consumer boycotts—as well as understanding the demand side of of media bias ( 11 , 12 ). For instance, to what extent is media bias driven by audience ratings?…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring dynamic media bias

Kim

Lelkes

McCrain

2022

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Ideological media bias is increasingly central to the study of politics. Yet, past literature often assumes that the ideological bias of any outlet, at least in the short term, is static and exogenous to the political process. We challenge this assumption. We use longitudinal data from the Stanford Cable News Analyzer (2010 to 2021), which reports the screen time of various political actors on cable news, and quantify the partisan leaning of those actors using their past campaign donation behavior. Using one instantiation of media bias—the mean ideology of political actors on a channel, i.e., visibility bias—we examine weekly, within-day, and program-level estimates of media bias. We find that media bias is highly dynamic even in the short term and that the heightened polarization between TV channels over time was mostly driven by the prime-time shows.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring dynamic media bias

Kim

Lelkes

McCrain

2022

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…We took account of the various methods and concepts scholars have used to measure the political identity of media outlets (e.g., story treatments, editorials and opinion pieces, ownership, support for governments or political parties/individuals, support for policy options, viewership/readership profiles, newsroom ideologies), particularly across different countries 38,54,55,[70][71][72] . Labeling is not straightforward: a channel can be seen as "center-left" or "left-wing" because the general media landscape is biased toward the right; or a media outlet, such as Globo TV in Brazil, can be left-wing or progressive on social issues or the environment, but conservative on economic issues or opposition to left-wing political parties.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate delay discourses present in global mainstream television coverage of the IPCC’s 2021 report

Painter

Ettinger

Holmes

et al. 2023

Commun Earth Environ

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Recent scholarship suggests that groups who oppose acting on climate change have shifted their emphasis from attacking the credibility of climate science itself to questioning the policies intended to address it, a position often called ‘response skepticism’. As television is the platform most used by audiences around the world to receive climate information, we examine 30 news programmes on 20 channels in Australia, Brazil, Sweden, the UK and USA which included coverage of the 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the Physical Science. Using manual quantitative content analysis, we find that skepticism about the science of climate change is still prevalent in channels that we have classified as ‘right-wing’, but largely absent from channels classified as ‘mainstream’. Forms of response skepticism are particularly common in ‘right-wing’ channels, but also present in some ‘mainstream’ coverage. Two of the most prominent discourses question the perceived economic costs of taking action and the personal sacrifices involved. We explore the implications of our findings for future research and climate communication.

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“…Second, consistent with Hassell, Miles and Reuning (2022), the ideology of the newsroom (as measured by journalists’ ideological placement of their own newspaper) is correlated with the actual slant of the political news coverage those newspapers produce. Newspapers identified by journalists as more liberal (conservative) produced more liberal (conservative) content.…”

Section: Journalists and Newsroom Ideological Diversitymentioning

confidence: 74%

“…15 Journalists are knowledgeable about the ideological leanings and norms of their place of employment (Breed 1955;Epstein 1973) because of the consequences for correspondents "who strays repeatedly from the norms of the organization" (Epstein 1973, 76). 16 In addition, recent work has specifically shown that journalists' placement of their own and other prominent newspapers on an ideological scale is highly correlated with media slant or the content that the newspaper produces (Hassell, Miles, and Reuning 2022). We can also be confident that these rating reflect reality for a number of reasons.…”

Section: Measuring Newspaper Ideologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Polarized news coverage across newspapers would suggest low levels of diversity within newsrooms. However, despite perceptions of a polarized media environment, there is little evidence of bias in which political stories newspapers choose to cover (Butler and Schofield 2010; Hassell, Holbein, and Miles 2020) and only minor differences in how political stories are covered across newspapers (Budak, Goel, and Rao 2016; Hassell, Miles, and Reuning 2022), a stark contrast from the more polarized television and cable media (DellaVigna and Kaplan 2007; Martin and McCrain 2019). This evidence suggests our first hypothesis:…”

Section: Ideological Sorting In Journalist Employment Decisionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Newsroom Ideological Diversity and the Ideological Sorting of Journalists

Hassell,

Miles,

Morecraft

2023

Political Research Quarterly

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In efforts to curb ideological bias in the news, citizens, academics, and journalists have highlighted the importance of newsroom ideological diversity. Using a large-scale survey of newspaper political journalists in the United States, we examine the diversity of ideological perspectives of political journalists across newspapers and communities and how ideological misalignments with the newsroom and the local community relate to those journalists’ employment decisions. We find political newspaper reporters regularly work for newspapers and in communities that do not mirror their own ideological perspectives. However, by following newspaper political journalists’ employment decisions over a three-year period, we also find that the ideological differences between those journalists and the newsroom where they work (but not ideological difference with the local community) are related to an increase in journalists’ desire to change jobs and in the likelihood they will actually seek other employment, either within journalism or outside of the profession.

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Does the Ideology of the Newsroom Affect the Provision of Media Slant?

Cited by 10 publications

References 59 publications

Measuring dynamic media bias

Measuring dynamic media bias

Climate delay discourses present in global mainstream television coverage of the IPCC’s 2021 report

Newsroom Ideological Diversity and the Ideological Sorting of Journalists

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