Measuring Explicit Political Positions of Media

Abstract

We amass a new, large-scale dataset of newspaper editorials that allows us to calculate fine-grained measures of the political positions of newspaper editorial pages. Collecting and classifying over 1500 editorials adopted by 25 major US newspapers on 495 Supreme Court cases from 1994 to 2004, we apply an item response theoretic approach to place newspaper editorial boards on a substantively meaningful-and long validated-scale of political preferences. We validate the measures, show how they can be used to shed light on the permeability of the wall between news and editorial desks, and argue that the general strategy we employ has great potential for more widespread use.

Citizen-editors' endogenous information acquisition and news accuracy

“…Hence, by inducing an editor to sample more, a media outlet would also delay the release of the news report which may have a negative effect on the demand for it and, hence, on the profits. 35 Indeed,x e → 0 andx e → 1 if and only if n * e → −∞,n * e → ∞, δ → 1/2 and C → 0.…”

“…34 Moreover, it would be extremely costly for a media outlet to induce a moderate editor to gather an amount of information such that even extremists citizens would consider this media outlet a valuable source of information. 35 In addition, as discussed in section 4, while all citizens with preferencesx e | xe= 1 2 < x i <x e | xe= 1 2 find the information coming from a moderate editor valuable, 33 Notice that a media outlet may also decrease c by giving the editor more resources to produce the news reports (e.g., more correspondents, better technology, more resources to investigate an issue, etc.). 34 Moreover, the cost of acquiring information by editors may be also reinterpreted as a discount factor (see Brocas and Carrillo 2009).…”

Legitimising Emerging Power Diplomacy: an Analysis of Government and Media Discourses on Brazilian Foreign Policy under Lula

“…We have chosen four news outlets, two international and two national, looking for variation in both variables. For the foreign press, the New York Times (NYT) was chosen, because it is a left-leaning US newspaper whose readership is concentrated in its own country (90%), so its discourse should chiefly reflect the US national interest (Ho and Quinn 2008); and then the right-leaning Financial Times (FT), a British daily whose readership is geographically dispersed (Europe, Middle East and Africa: 38%; Americas: 33%; UK: 21%; Asia-Pacific: 8%) and whose discourse should likewise allude to a more cosmopolitan, transnational set of interests (Reese 2008). 5 For the domestic press, national interest is held constant.…”

A linguistic framework for studying voices and positions in the climate debate

“…Newspapers, representing the fourth estate and thus themselves social actors, are typically associated with specific values, ideologies, and political preferences (Carvalho 2007;Ho and Quinn 2008). The newspaper's editorial line provides an outer frame in which the individual journalist presents his or her take on the situation.…”