December 5, 2018
Hans Hassell (Florida State University)
Research on media bias has focused almost entirely on how the media chooses to frame the news and the way they talk about the issues found in the news. However, journalists also have large leeway in deciding what to cover. Using a large scale survey of political reporters and editors combined with an audit study of those same individuals, we show that the media is not immune to ideological bias in deciding what to cover. Specifically, we show that ideological biases change the nature of elections by changing which political candidates are more likely to be covered. Our results show that reporters are more willing to express an interest in covering a candidate whose ideology and party affiliation matches their own. Moreover, we show that these results are not driven by the ideological composition of the population in the area where the newspaper is published. We show that the ideology of journalists affects the likelihood that candidates of one party or another are provided coverage in the news.