When the anchorman Matt Lauer declared on the "Today" show last week that his network, NBC, would start referring to the conflict in Iraq as a "civil war," he inadvertently started his own civil war within the American news media.
Fox News refused to follow suit, saying that non-Iraqis were involved in the fighting, "and that makes it something different." Accusations of partisanship flew in all directions.
Yet newspapers around the country have been making decisions on this matter for months. The Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor have somewhat officially termed the conflict a civil war; The Washington Post has not.
Any politician will tell you that sometimes what we call things is the most political decision of all. American political consultants like Frank Luntz, a Republican, have become famous for their way of spinning language to partisan advantage: "death tax" instead of "estate tax," "war on terror" instead of "war in Iraq." But most people expect spin from politicians. When they perceive partisan slant in the news itself, they typically interpret it as evidence of underlying bias by reporters or media owners.
But one of the most interesting things coming out of research on the economics of the media industry has been the notion that media slant may simply reflect business rather than politics.
New a study by two University of Chicago economists, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, "What Drives Media Slant? Evidence From U.S. Daily Newspapers" compiles some compelling and altogether unusual data to answer the question.
Gentzkow and Shapiro started in the world of the political. They parsed the words of politicians - all the words - from the 2005 U.S. Congressional Record. They found the 1,000 most partisan phrases uttered in the year. They measured this by comparing how frequently a phrase was used by one side or the other.
In 2005, phrases like "death tax," "illegal aliens," "Terri Schiavo," and "nuclear power" came mostly from Republicans. Phrases like "minimum wage," "public broadcasting," "middle class" and "oil companies" came mostly from Democrats. Using those phrases, the two economists made a simple index of partisanship that lined up with standard measures like a politician's score on the Americans for Democratic Action's ideological scale.
The study then analyzed 417 newspapers in the United States, accounting for about 70 percent of total newspaper circulation, as if they were politicians. The researchers measured, for example, all the times in articles about Social Security that a newspaper referred to "personal accounts," a Republican term, or to "private accounts," a Democratic one. Their measure of partisan slant came only from the news coverage; they did not include anything from editorial pages.
The index matched most popular perceptions of newspaper partisanship. Papers like The Washington Times or The Deseret Morning News of Salt Lake City, Utah, used Republican phrases while papers like The San Francisco Chronicle and The Boston Globe used Democratic ones.
But more important, once the authors had this measure, they showed that the main driver of any slant was the newspaper's audience, not bias by the newspaper's owner.
A comparison of circulation data (per capita) to the ratio of Republican to Democratic campaign contributions by postal code showed that circulation was strongly related to whether the newspaper matched the readers' own ideology.
Their measure indicates that The Los Angeles Times, for example, is a liberal paper. Its circulation suffers in Southern California postal codes where donations to Republicans are especially high.
The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Shapiro put it during an interview, "The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers' demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales."
On one hand, that sounds a little mercenary. On the other, there is certainly good news in the finding.
If slant comes from customers, then the views of the owners and the reporters do not matter. We do not need to fear that some partisan billionaire will buy up newspapers and use them for propaganda.
Indeed, the study found that the views of the owner had no significant effect on the slant of the newspaper. The partisanship of corporate donations from the owner had no bearing on the slant of the news coverage in the paper. The slant of a newspaper group's other newspapers had no bearing, either. The New York Times Co.'s newspaper in Spartanburg, South Carolina, for example, had the same slant as other newspapers in South Carolina that the company did not own.
So although politicians from both sides tend to accuse the news media of partisanship and negativity, the data suggest that they ought to blame the public. The papers basically reflect what their readers want to hear.
No doubt, the battles over partisan language will continue. But to explain it, you need not try to find the inner politics of Matt Lauer, the ultimate ownership of the news media or even the facts on the ground in Iraq. A simpler approach would take a three-word phrase that never showed up on the partisan index: follow the money.
