There have been a flurry of economic papers addressing the issue of media bias or media “slant” in recent years. Leading examples of these include research by Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo, Matt Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, and Andrei Shleifer and Sendhil Mullainathan.
In the introduction to their paper published in the American Economic Review, Shleifer and Mullainathan provide the following hypothetical example:
Would this sort of thing actually happen in the real world? You be the judge.
Here are the headlines from Thursday’s New York Times and Washington Post:
The full texts of the New York Times story and the Washington Post story are here and here.
(Hat tip: Matt Gentzkow)
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Some people have suggested that reporters are biased to see the news as bad, because the news media itself is in a recession and their jobs are at risk.
Ah, the marvelous phenomenon known as “spin.” And to think that folks in the mass media wonder why so many people distrust journalists … we have a side-by-side comparison which shows how reporters can tell the same story in two very different ways.
Which of these are we to trust? Is either story trustworthy at all? If the above-linked poll is correct, more than half of Americans have decided that neither can be correct.
Journalism in the US … especially print-media journalism such as newspapers … is fading fast. Their current business model is collapsing and they have yet to adopt a workable new one. Many papers are clinging to life by just a hair.
Yet they continue to “spin” the news all over the place, leaving readers no choice but to distrust them. And they wonder why no one buys papers any more.
I agree with 1, The local paper here just laid off 50 people.
Gentzkow rules!
that’s why adults read between the lines
This is what happens when news outlets focus on providing opinions or points of view, rather than reporting the news to the public. And this had been made prevalent due to laziness of the public, who have outsourced their analysis and critical thinking to the media and just wants to be fed packaged points of view.
May be if we start exercising our brains a bit, we might stop this trend of being led like sheep, and then we don’t have to choose where we want to get the prepackaged news from, and rather get the actual data and form our own opinions.
As to whether there is bias in the media, I think we can take them at their word when they’re as candid as Daniel Okrent was a few years ago:
THE PUBLIC EDITOR; Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?
By DANIEL OKRENT
Published: July 25, 2004
OF course it is.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E7D8173DF936A15754C0A9629C8B63
“If it bleeds, it leads.”
This has always been the stance of mainstream media. If the economy is hemorrhaging jobs & GDP growth it grabs more attention than “GDP grows at .1% better than expected”.
Nothing new in terms of news bias, it just happens to be about the economy.