Watchdogs with Bias-Tinted Glasses

    Edmund Burke, in reference to the press gallery in the House of Commons after the French Revolution, once noted, "Yonder sits the Fourth Estate, and they are more important than them all." Two hundred years later, the impact of media coverage on issues such as political scandals confirms Burke's assessment of the press as a "watchdog" of politicians.

     Being a watchdog, however, does not imply that all news organizations cover all scandals in equal depth. In their 2008 paper "Media Coverage of Political Scandals," Riccardo Puglisi from Université Libre de Bruxelles and James M. Snyder, Jr. from MIT analyze the relationships between a newspaper's ostensible political leaning and its treatment of political scandals. Using archives from the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times, the authors found that national newspapers ideologically identified as "Democrat" report more on Republican scandals and vice versa. Ideological leanings were determined by an analysis of the political alignment of think tanks cited, language, and variations in the intensity of coverage for certain topics. Local newspapers, however, only engage in such behavior if the politician in question is from the same congressional district or state. The authors suggest that this is because slanted coverage, which caters to the newspaper subscriber in order to confirm their political beliefs, is constrained by ex-ante preferences or, in other words, an interest for local people and events.

     While overall the coverage of scandals in the past has been relatively limited, the impact has been disproportionately large. To illustrate the relationship between a paper's ideological leaning and type of coverage, Puglisi and Snyder point out the enormous effect that the Watergate debacle has had as a benchmark for analyzing more recent coverage of scandals. In this instance, the authors found that papers identified as Democratic were 26% more likely to report on Republican scandals than Democratic ones. Newspapers with larger circulation tended to give more space to scandals, probably because they cater to a broader ideological spectrum than a local newspaper.

    There are several explanations for these results. The principal one is that the partisan leaning of a newspaper's stakeholders such as owners, editors and journalists, has a strong correlation with the differential coverage of Democratic and Republican scandals. Blatant reporting bias, however, begins to disappear when the newspaper faces stiffer regional competition. On the demand side, one assumes that readers consume news in order to either acquire information or confirm prior beliefs – usually more of the latter than the former. Political bias inevitably seeps into reporting when factors from both the demand-side and supply-side favor a paper whose articles are ideologically aligned with its public and the paper's owners. Though potentially damaging to the role of the media as an unbiased "watchdog," one could also argue that as long as there is no imbalance in the amount of pro-Republican versus pro-Democratic coverage, the chance that more of the truth surrounding these scandals will be exposed is significantly increased.