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Multidimensional media slant: complementarities in news reporting by US newspapers

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  • Sandra García-Uribe

    (Banco de España)

Abstract

Are editors’ choices of front page news based on the potential complementarities between the news items? This paper studies front page choices made by editors of major newspapers in the US. I document that newspapers front pages are biased to certain combinations of news on top of biased to certain news. To identify my measures of bias, I exploit the variation in news relevance across different topics and days. To measure the news relevance I use lead news choices of other US mass media. As a consequence, my measures of bias are relative to the overall media bias. I also provide a reader-maximization model for front page decisions that I use to interpret the empirical biases of the newspaper as preferences of its population of target readers. From my estimation, I recover maps of complementarities among pairs of topics for each of the major US newspapers. I fi nd that complementarities between news contribute in a large portion to the probability that news on a topic appears in the front page.

Suggested Citation

  • Sandra García-Uribe, 2018. "Multidimensional media slant: complementarities in news reporting by US newspapers," Working Papers 1817, Banco de España.
    • Handle: RePEc:bde:wpaper:1817
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Media bias; discrete choice; complementarities; multiple products;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
    • C25 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Discrete Regression and Qualitative Choice Models; Discrete Regressors; Proportions; Probabilities
    • C55 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Large Data Sets: Modeling and Analysis
    • L82 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Entertainment; Media

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