Does the Ideology of the Newsroom Affect the Provision of Media Slant?

Abstract

Although research on the provision of ideologically slanted news has focused on consumers’ demands or news ownership’s profit margins and political agendas, little focus has been paid to those individuals who create the news content: the political journalists. We use a new measure of newspaper ideology derived from a large scale survey of journalists to estimate the ideology of almost 700 newsrooms, a substantial increase over previous efforts. By estimating newsroom ideology independent of content we show that newsroom ideology influences the responsiveness of newspapers to the demands of readers. We find that newsroom ideology has an effect on the ideological slant of news content even after controlling for consumer preferences. While consumer demand influences the ideological content of the news, the ideology of the newsroom that produces the news skews the responsiveness to the demands of readership and ultimately affects the production of ideological slant in the news.