Media bias is good for business

"Bias is not a bug but a feature," writes Virginia Postrel in her NYT Business Pages column, quoting the authors of a new paper, "The Market for News":

"We assume that readers prefer to hear or read news that are more consistent with their beliefs," they write.

In a competitive news market, they argue, producers can use bias to differentiate their products and stave off price competition. Bias increases consumer loyalty.

Reporters who firmly believe themselves to be disinterested observers may further this strategy if they share their audience's assumptions about how the world works and, hence, how to interpret particular facts.

The model would explain market loyalty to The New York vs. The Washington Times, for example. A hypothetical case illustrates the point:

Suppose, for instance, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics announces that the unemployment rate has risen to 6.3 percent from 6.1 percent.

In their article, the economists imagine two different takes on the story. One hypothetical version, with the headline "Recession Fears Grow," notes that 200,000 people have lost their jobs in the past quarter . . . The other, called "Turnaround in Sight," emphasizes the small magnitude of the increase -- just 0.2 percent.

"Each of these stories could easily have been written by a major U.S. newspaper," write Professors Mullainathan and Shleifer. "Neither story says anything false, yet they give radically different impressions."

What would the two Times do? Easy, isn't it?  With their nemesis in the White House and both houses of Congress under Republican control, the NYT would go for the glass-half-empty scenario. The WT would likely see the glass as half full and the tap turned on.

"But all the information is out there," adds Postrel:

Indeed, a wide-ranging reader would learn more from the two differently biased reports than from the raw unemployment figures.

That is one important difference between the relatively subtle choices that can bias real-world reporting and the simplifying assumptions that the two economists use to model bias mathematically.

Hmm.  "Subtle choices" that can bias real-world reporting? The New York Times? That's debatable.  But the idea that how two different media outlets present the same set of facts is inherently biased is a lesson that seems to have eluded some of our media elites, who imagine they practice that elusive ideal they learned in J school, "objective reporting." Of course it helps if you believe your own world view is that of all right-thinking people. In light of the new research -- as we always say, experts are the last to know what common sense tells the rest of us -- "objective reporting" is not only unattainable, but it's bad for business too.

Comments

[goomp]

Like Darwinians, Libertarians, Conservatives, Liberals or what have you, I am not biased; I am right. So, I'll tell you what happened. Those beguiled by the song of equal results thru state control of our lives infiltrated our educational system and produced a generation lacking in an understanding of the history of how this USA evolved and of the principles which made it the freest society in the world. Inspired by these Socialist ideas many of those in the media preached against the country which had given them their freedom. Thanks to the emergence of the internet and the blogs, a dissemination of conflicting ideas is now becoming wide spread.

[andophiroxia]

The true voice of the people being to speak again.

[Teresa]

On reading this I was struck by one big problem... the hypothetical headlines. It occurs to me that while we might see the first headline

"Recession Fears Grow"

I don't believe I've read a single newspaper - ever that would use the second headline

"Turnaround in Sight"

After all, we went through the entire decade of the roaring 90's when each Christmas season had the dark headlines about how bad business was, how projections wouldn't be met... yada yada yada. And now people look back on those as "great years".

Considering how newspapers work... is there any type of "positive" headline you can imagine being displayed in any major newspaper around the country?