Distorting the News? The Mechanisms of Partisan Media Bias and Its Effects on News Production
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Distorting the News? The Mechanisms of Partisan Media Bias and Its Effects on News Production Doron Shultziner1 · Yelena Stukalin2
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Integrating scholarship from several fields of study, this paper proposes a new model for understanding how partisan bias operates and how to measure its effects. We chart the factors that influence partisan bias over news production within news organizations that are simultaneously constrained and conditioned by factors of market competition, context considerations and journalistic norms. We argue that partisan media bias of a news-story is expressed in the manner that different news outlets cover the same political story within the same timeframe relative to one another. We find that description bias is a key parameter that is intertwined with selection bias mechanisms that highlight and downplay news items according to their content. We illustrate how partisan media coverage occurs in the context of a major political protest in Israel. We employ a dataset consisting of 1556 news products from all major newspapers. We find that partisan bias finds its strongest expression in the types of news products that the news outlets emphasize on their front-page and in the sizing of articles. These mechanisms of partisan bias can be generalized in the study of partisan bias in other types of news outlets. Keywords Partisan media bias · Partisan coverage · News imbalance · News production · Protest coverage · Social movements and media Democracy requires a vibrant media environment that provides the public with reliable news, is committed to the truthful representation of reality based on checked facts, and delivers relevant and accurate stories about politics. These objectives are normally achieved by a diversified and decentralized news market, by competition * Doron Shultziner [email protected] Yelena Stukalin [email protected] 1
Politics & Communication Department, Hadassah Academic College, Jerusalem, Israel
2
Statistical Education Unit, School of Behavioral Sciences, Tel Aviv-Yaffo Academic College, Tel‑Aviv, Israel
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Political Behavior
among news outlets over newsworthy stories, and by a professional ethos of objectivity among journalists. In recent years, however, the general public, political leaders and scholars have increasingly charged that the media is politically and ideologically motivated. Partisan media bias, henceforth PMB for short, is a political or ideological slanting of the news in a way that favors, criticizes, emphasizes or ignores certain political actors, policies, events or topics. PMB may be a systematic ideological bias according to left-right positions in a certain political system (Groseclose and Milyo 2005a, p. 306). PMB can also be applied to a specific politician or event despite their ideological affiliation, e.g., when a right-wing outlet that supports a right-wing prime minister attacks a right-wing politician who poses a threat to the p
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