Framing the Right Suspects: Measuring Media Bias

This paper empirically examines how political bias affects content in large daily newspapers and the source of the demand for that bias. Consistent with prior research, this paper finds media bias. The media examined are three to six times more likely to associate ideological labels with conservative think tanks than liberal think tanks. This tends to frame the analysis done by conservative think tanks as being less objective than the analysis done by liberal think tanks. A major contribution of this paper is identifying the source of bias. A detailed examination of the differences in the citation patterns across publications suggests that the sources of the bias are reporter/editor preferences rather than the preferences of publishers or customers