PARTISAN NEWS:
THE MARKET FOR COVERAGE
JOHN T. GASPER
Abstract. Since the early work of Downs, the demand for political information has pre-
sented a problem to rational choice theorists. In terms of news coverage, market pressures
should lead to see the same coverage by different media outlets. But then why do we
see so many claims to the contrary? Contemporary work in the psychology of decision
making suggests that people suffer from a confirmation bias. This bias can be thought of
as a tendency to seek out, or prefer, information that confirms one’s prior belief. In this
paper we propose a formal model of the market for political news, and show that when
the audience has this bias it may be profitable for firms to differentiate their coverage or
evaluations.
Introduction
The news media plays a crucial role in how individuals go about acquiring information. It
provides information that the public might deem useful in making individual and collective
decisions. Yet, several recent books – and some street-level folk wisdom – have accused
major news networks of having a political bias. However, there does not seem to be a
consensus on the direction of the bias. Some public figures, such as Ann Coulter [5], claim
an overwhelming liberal bias, while others, such as Al Franken [9], point to a right wing
media. Our goal is not to argue that there is a bias, be it a left or a right wing one. Rather,
Preliminary draft. March, 2005
Prepared for delivery at the Midwest Political Science annual meeting.
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