TY - JOUR AU - Larcinese,Valentino AU - Puglisi,Riccardo AU - Snyder,James M., Jr. TI - Partisan Bias in Economic News: Evidence on the Agenda-Setting Behavior of U.S. Newspapers JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 13378 PY - 2007 Y2 - September 2007 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13378 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13378.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Valentino Larcinese Department of Government and STICERD London School of Economics Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK E-Mail: V.Larcinese@lse.ac.uk Riccardo Puglisi Department of Economics, Statistics and Law University of Pavia Corso Strada Nuova 65 27100 Pavia Italy E-Mail: riccardo.puglisi@unipv.it James M. Snyder, Jr. Harvard University 1737 Cambridge Street, CGIS Knafel Building Room 413 Cambridge, MA 02138 Tel: 617/496-1089 E-Mail: jsnyder@gov.harvard.edu AB - We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit. We investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president's political affiliation. We find evidence that newspapers with pro-Democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern. This result is not driven by the partisanship of readers. There is on the contrary no evidence of a partisan bias -- or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement policy -- for stories on inflation, budget deficit or trade deficit. ER -