More unemployment stories when paper leans opposite president

Newspapers with pro-Democratic endorsement pattern routinely give more coverage to high unemployment rates when the president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern, according to a new study by professors.

Valentino Larcinese, a government professor at the London School of Economics, Riccardo Puglisi, a political science professor at M.I.T., and James Snyder, an M.I.T. economist, conducted the study, which can be found on the National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

They collected endorsement information on 102 newspapers dating back to 1996.

What they discovered was that newspapers that had historically endorsed Democrats gave less coverage to high unemployment when Bill Clinton was president and more coverage to high unemployment under President Bush’s time in office. They found the opposite to be true during periods of low unemployment.

The study stated, “When the unemployment rate was one percentage point above the average, newspapers with a strong propensity to endorse Republican candidates reacted with 15% more articles under Clinton than under Bush. For the same one percent increase, newspapers with a strong pro-Democratic endorsement policy have 9% less news on unemployment under Clinton than Bush.”

The professors also concluded that the result is not driven by the partisanship of readers.

They also wrote that there is 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.