How Does the Media Bias the News? Evidence from the Universe of French Broadcasts, 2002-2020

Department of Economics and Decision Sciences

Speaker:  Camille Urvoy (Uni. Manheim)

Room T-014

Abstract :

How does the media bias the news? Using novel data on journalists and guests appearing in millions of French television and radio shows over nearly 20 years, this article opens the black box of news production and highlights the mechanisms through which slant happens. Thanks to thousands of journalists moving across outlets, we first estimate a two-way fixed effects model and decompose the across-outlet variance in political group representation into three factors: (i) differences in journalist composition, (ii) journalist compliance with distinct editorial lines, and (iii) journalist sorting on outlets. Differences in coverage across outlets are largely explained by channel-level decisions, not by journalists' preferences. We then study how journalists adapt to a major ownership-driven change in editorial line. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we show that the journalists who stayed after the takeover largely complied with the new editorial line, but that many others left the acquired outlets.