Who's the Fairest of them All? An Empirical Test for Partisan Bias on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News

TLDR

Media bias claims are often undermined by subjectivity and a lack of data on unselected stories, limiting prior studies' validity. This study aims to overcome these limitations and comprehensively test for bias in television news. The authors analyze coverage of presidential approval polls on Fox News's Special Report and ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts over the past decade. They find substantial bias in news choices across all four outlets, with some networks showing stronger bias than Fox.

Abstract

While accusations of media bias have long been a staple of partisan discourse, a number of issues have generally undermined their scholarly validity. While some have unearthed specific instances of biased story construction or patterns of bias in news content, these examples tend to be undermined by the inherent subjectivity of defining “bad” news. Moreover, these studies are generally unable to test for selection bias because they cannot observe the characteristics of stories that were not selected for broadcast. This study is designed to overcome these problems and allow for a more comprehensive test for detecting bias in television news. In particular, this study examines coverage of presidential approval polls on Fox News's flagship news program, Special Report , as well as on ABC's, CBS's, and NBC's evening newscasts over the last decade. The results provide substantial evidence for bias in the news choices across the four news outlets, although somewhat surprisingly, the results are stronger for some of the networks than for Fox.