PARTISANSHIP AT THE NYT
There isn’t a link for this yet, but I have a report which is part of a Ph.D. dissertation in economics entitled “Being the New York Times: the Political Behaviour of a Newspaper” by Riccardo Puglisi of the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD). Mr. Puglisi has analyzed a dataset of stories in the NYT covering 1946 to 1994, looking to see whether the paper’s relative emphasis on various issues tended to change during presidential campaigns:
My main result is that the New York Times has a Democratic partisanship, with some watchdog aspects, in that during the presidential campaign it gives more emphasis to Democratic topics, but only so when the incumbent president is a Republican. This set of Democratic topics comprises stories about civil rights, health care, labor and emloyment, and social welfare. In fact, controlling for seasonal effects and a deterministic time trend, I find that the New York Times, if the incumbent president is a Republican, increases the frequency of stories about Democratic topics when the presidential campaign kicks in. Such effect is quite sizeable in relative terms: when the incumbent president is a Republican, there are 26 percent more stories about Democratic issues during the three months of the campaign than outside of it. On the contrary, if the incumbent president is a Democrat, the partisan effect and watchdog effect almost cancel each other, so that there is no discernible change in the count of Democratic stories when the presidential campaign kicks in.
Regarding the issue balance of stories out of the presidential campaign, I find that the New York Times devotes more space to Democratic issues, when the incumbent president is a Democrat. It is however unclear whether or not this finding is due to the fact that Democratic presidents dedicate more time and effort to the owned issues, as compared with Republican ones, and the New York Times is simply reflecting this fact through its editorial choices.
I’ll comment on this, probably tomorrow. Thanks to Donald Luskin for sending me a copy of the paper.
