Media Bias

Sendhil Mullainathan, Andrei Shleifer

NBER Working Paper No. 9295
Issued in October 2002
NBER Program(s):   CF

There are two different types of media bias. One bias, which we refer to as ideology, reflects a news outlet's desire to affect reader opinions in a particular direction. The second bias, which we refer to as spin, reflects the outlet's attempt to simply create a memorable story. We examine competition among media outlets in the presence of these biases. Whereas competition can eliminate the effect of ideological bias, it actually exaggerates the incentive to spin stories.

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