So much for sad and happy text. How do you figure out what words are liberal or conservative? And what does that tell us about the modern news media? This is a bit more complicated, which brings us back to Gentzkow and Shapiro. Remember, they were the economists who saw gay marriage described different ways in two different newspapers and wondered if they could use language to uncover political bias.
The first thing these two ambitious young scholars did was examine transcripts of the Congressional Record. Since this record was already digitized, they could download every word used by every Democratic congressperson in 2005 and every word used by every Republican congressperson in 2005. They could then see if certain phrases were significantly more likely to be used by Democrats or Republicans.
Some were indeed. Here are a few examples in each category.
PHRASES USED FAR MORE BY DEMOCRATS
PHRASES USED FAR MORE BY REPUBLICANS
Estate tax
Death tax
Privatize social security
Reform social security
Rosa Parks
Saddam Hussein
Workers rights
Private property rights
Poor people
Government spending
What explains these differences in language?
Sometimes Democrats and Republicans use different phrasing to describe the same concept. In 2005, Republicans tried to cut the federal inheritance tax. They tended to describe it as a “death tax” (which sounds like an imposition upon the newly deceased). Democrats described it as an “estate tax” (which sounds like a tax on the wealthy). Similarly, Republicans tried to move Social Security into individual retirement accounts. To Republicans, this was a “reform.” To Democrats, this was a more dangerous-sounding “privatization.”
Sometimes differences in language are a question of emphasis. Republicans and Democrats presumably both have great respect for Rosa Parks, the civil rights hero. But Democrats talked about her more frequently. Likewise, Democrats and Republicans presumably both think that Saddam Hussein, the former leader of Iraq, was an evil dictator. But Republicans repeatedly mentioned him in their attempt to justify the Iraq War. Similarly, “workers’ rights” and concern for “poor people” are core principles of the Democratic Party. “Private property rights” and cutting “government spending” are core principles of Republicans.
And these differences in language use are substantial. For example, in 2005, congressional Republicans used the phrase “death tax” 365 times and “estate tax” only 46 times. For congressional Democrats, the pattern was reversed. They used the phrase “death tax” only 35 times and “estate tax” 195 times.
And if these words can tell us whether a congressperson is a Democrat or a Republican, the scholars realized, they could also tell us whether a newspaper tilts left or right. Just as Republican congresspeople might be more likely to use the phrase “death tax” to persuade people to oppose it, conservative newspapers might do the same. The relatively liberal Washington Post used the phrase “estate tax” 13.7 times more frequently than they used the phrase “death tax.” The conservative Washington Times used “death tax” and “estate tax” about the same amount.
Thanks to the wonders of the internet, Gentzkow and Shapiro could analyze the language used in a large number of the nation’s newspapers. The scholars utilized two websites, newslibrary.com and proquest.com, which together had digitized 433 newspapers. They then counted how frequently one thousand such politically charged phrases were used in newspapers in order to measure the papers’ political slant. The most liberal newspaper, by this measure, proved to be the Philadelphia Daily News; the most conservative: the Billings (Montana) Gazette.
When you have the first comprehensive measure of media bias for such a wide swath of outlets, you can answer perhaps the most important question about the press: why do some publications lean left and others right?
The economists quickly homed in on one key factor: the politics of a given area. If an area is generally liberal, as Philadelphia and Detroit are, the dominant newspaper there tends to be liberal. If an area is more conservative, as are Billings and Amarillo, Texas, the dominant paper there tends to be conservative. In other words, the evidence strongly suggests that newspapers are inclined to give their readers what they want.
You might think a paper’s owner would have some influence on the slant of its coverage, but as a rule, who owns a paper has less effect than we might think upon its political bias. Note what happens when the same person or company owns papers in different markets. Consider the New York Times Company. It owns what Gentzkow and Shapiro find to be the liberal-leaning New York Times, based in New York City, where roughly 70 percent of the population is Democratic. It also owned, at the time of the study, the conservative-leaning, by their measure, Spartanburg Herald-Journal, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where roughly 70 percent of the population is Republican. There are exceptions, of course: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns what just about anyone would find to be the conservative New York Post. But, overall, the findings suggest that the market determines newspapers’ slants far more than owners do.
The study has a profound impact on how we think about the news media. Many people, particularly Marxists, have viewed American journalism as controlled by rich people or corporations with the goal of influencing the masses, perhaps to push people toward their political views. Gentzkow and Shapiro’s paper suggests, however, that this is not the predominant motivation of owners. The owners of the American press, instead, are primarily giving the masses what they want so that the owners can become even richer.
Oh, and one more question—a big, controversial, and perhaps even more provocative question. Do the American news media, on average, slant left or right? Are the media on average liberal or conservative?
Gentzkow and Shapiro found that newspapers slant left. The average newspaper is more similar, in the words it uses, to a Democratic congressperson than it is to a Republican congressperson.
“Aha!” conservative readers may be ready to scream, “I told you so!” Many conservatives have long suspected newspapers have been biased to try to manipulate the masses to support left-wing viewpoints.
Not so, say the authors. In fact, the liberal bias is well calibrated to what newspaper readers want. Newspaper readership, on average, tilts a bit left. (They have data on that.) And newspapers, on average, tilt a bit left to give their readers the viewpoints they demand.
There is no grand conspiracy. There is just capitalism.
The news media, Gentzkow and Shapiro’s results imply, often operate like every other industry on the planet. Just as supermarkets figure out what ice cream people want and fill their shelves with it, newspapers figure out what viewpoints people want and fill their pages with it. “It’s just a business,” Shapiro told me. That is what you can learn when you break down and quantify matters as convoluted as news, analysis, and opinion into their component parts: words.
PICTURES AS DATA