What Drives Demand for Media Slant?

• We conduct within-outlet, within-topic analysis of the relationship between partisan congeniality of news and news demand. We study “horse race” news on the 2012 and 2016US presidential campaigns from six major online outlets, and data from incentivized surveys on news on the winners of presidential campaign debates. We find some evidenceof higher demand for more congenial stories (within-outlet-topic), and some evidence ofhigher demand for more uncongenial stories. We argue the former evidence is most consistent with psychological theories of demand for slant, and the latter is most consistentwith the trust theory. We also obtain evidence of systematically congenial outlet-levelhorse race slant, arguably consistent with both the psychology and trust theories, butinconsistent with the instrumental value theory. 

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Nationalekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Economics (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

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