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 
I noticed the NYT headline because I was surprised growth was that high and, I must admit, an assumption on my part that later revisions tend to add not subtract, which might be wrong in this case.
Optimists: it’s really foggy today.
Pessimists: the sky is falling!
When you’ve recently lost the job you’d held for the last eleven years, you tend to nod your head at the one headline, and stare with incredulity at the other. I guess both beauty and ugliness lie in the eye of the beholder. I look forward to the results of this election while bearing in mind that “No one ever went broke betting on the gullibility of the American public.”.
I believe that this type of spin has been around forever. The only reason we are noticing this now is the influx of information at our fingertips as provided by the internet. 50 years ago a person got their news by buying a newspaper, listening to the radio, or watching television. With Newspapers, a person was probably unlikely to buy 4-5 newspapers to compare the spin on a certain story. With radio and TV the news was on different stations, but at the same time, so there was little possibility for comparison. Now a person is just a few clicks away from hundreds of different news sources, and can cheaply compare different sources and scrutinize them for bias. 24 hour news channels (CNN, FOX, MSNBC) also make comparisons easy.
“a recent interview with prius dealers shows the economy is booming…”
Could “media bias” please be a SuperFreakonimics subject? I know Farhad Manjoo has touched on it, but we normal people could use some help sorting through the equations in those referenced studies.
C’mon, this is a prime example of the glass being half empty/half full. The answer is in the eyes of the beholder. Trust the headline from the media outlet whose views most accurately emulate your own personal perspective and you will have the answer.
It probably also depends on how much money you have!