TY  - JOUR
AU  - Puglisi,Riccardo
AU  - Snyder,James M., Jr.
TI  - Media Coverage of Political Scandals
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14598
PY  - 2008
Y2  - December 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14598
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14598.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
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 analyze the coverage of U.S. political scandals by U.S. newspapers during the past decade. Using automatic keyword-based searches we collected data on 35 scandals and approximately 200 newspapers. We nd that Democratic-leaning newspapers -- i.e., those with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elections -- give relatively more coverage to scandals involving Republican politicians than scandals involving Democratic politicians, while Republican-leaning newspapers tend to do the opposite. This is true even when controlling for the average partisan leanings of readers. In contrast, newspapers appear to cater to the partisan tastes of readers only for local scandals.
ER  -