ECONOMIC VIEW
Do Newspapers Make Good News Look Bad?
By EDUARDO PORTER

Published: September 12, 2004

ONSERVATIVE pundits routinely accuse the news media of injecting a
liberal bias into coverage of issues from abortion to gun control to
gay marriage.

Now, two months before the presidential election, the economy has been
invited to the culture wars. In a new paper, Kevin A. Hassett and John
R. Lott Jr., economists at the American Enterprise Institute, the
conservative research organization in Washington, say they have
discovered that economic reporters commit the same archetypal sin:
slanting the news unequivocally in favor of the Democrats.

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How can a nugget of news like the economy's addition of 308,000 new
jobs in March - the biggest monthly gain in about four years - yield a
report that The Associated Press labeled "Bond prices tumble on jobs
data"? Bias, the researchers suspected.

The two economists combed through 389 newspapers and A.P. reports
contained in the LexisNexis database from January 1991 through May
2004, during the administrations of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton
and George W. Bush. They picked out headlines about gross domestic
product growth, unemployment, retail sales and orders of durable goods
and classified the headlines' depiction of the economy as either
positive, negative, neutral or mixed. Then they crunched some numbers.

They found that Mr. Clinton received better headlines than the two
Republican presidents. Even after adjusting the data to compensate for
differences in economic performance under the three presidents, the
Republicans received 20 to 30 percent fewer positive headlines, on
average, for the same type of news, they concluded.

For instance, they said, the unemployment rate in the Clinton
administration averaged 5.2 percent, only three-tenths of a percentage
point less than it has under George W. Bush. But while 44 percent of
Mr. Clinton's headlines on unemployment were positive, only 23 percent
of President Bush's headlines on the subject have been upbeat.

They found that as a group, the nation's 10 largest newspapers and The
Associated Press were even more skewed. According to the researchers,
this group gave Republican administrations 20 to 40 percent fewer
positive headlines than those given to Mr. Clinton, on average. Among
the top 10 newspapers, they said that all except The Houston Chronicle
had a pro-Democratic leaning, though the margin for error in their
calculations was too large to be meaningful for most of them
individually.

"We have not constructed tests that identify a motive for the bias,"
Mr. Hassett said. "A desire to aid the political fortunes of Democrats
could explain the patterns we see in the data." The research has
attracted some interest outside of conservative circles. Christopher
D. Carroll, an economist at Johns Hopkins University who served on Mr.
Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, said the paper by Mr. Hassett
and Mr. Lott was "the first serious statistical attempt to look at the
question that I've seen."

The researchers said liberal bias in economic reporting was also
uncovered in a 1988 study by Ted J. Smith III of Virginia Commonwealth
University. In it, he said that network television coverage during the
Reagan administration focused on negative economic stories, criticized
the administration for bad news and failed to give it credit for good
news.

Although many news-media watchdogs take business reporters to task for
biases, few say the problem stems from a political slant. "One of the
main biases we've found in business reporting is cheerleading," said
Jim Naureckas, an editor at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, which
is on the left side of the political spectrum. He argues that the news
media tend to favor the point of view of business because they depend
on advertising from business.

Alan S. Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve who
also served as an economic adviser to Mr. Clinton, said that, if
anything, current economic coverage favored Mr. Bush by letting the
administration get away with blaming 9/11 for the economy's poor
performance.

Jack Shafer, the media critic of Slate, the Web journal, was skeptical
of the study, saying that it was based solely on headlines, not on an
appraisal of actual news articles. "A headline is not coverage," he
said.

While the researchers of the American Enterprise Institute claim to
expose the political bias of the reporting, Mr. Carroll said, it was
unlikely that they succeeded in stripping out other factors. He said
the reporting of economic statistics depended on broad perceptions of
the state of the economy, which are influenced by many variables. The
fact that the economy did better under Mr. Clinton than either of the
Bushes probably affected the coverage more than the researchers
allowed for.

Moreover, Mr. Carroll pointed out that the results had large
statistical margins of error. "I'm not persuaded that the results have
any statistical significance," he said.

AND what of the researchers' own objectivity? Critics question both
their scholarship and their motivations in releasing this research in
the middle of a presidential campaign in which the economy is no small
issue. Mr. Hassett was an adviser to Senator John McCain, Republican
of Arizona, during his bid for the presidency in 2000, and a co-author
of "Dow 36,000," a wildly bullish analysis of the stock market's
prospects.

Mr. Lott's research supporting gun ownership as a crime deterrent has
also come under criticism. He acknowledged that he assumed a pseudonym
- Mary Rosh- to write his own praise and defend his positions in
online debate on that subject from 2000 through January 2003.

Mr. Lott said that the things he had said in the guise of Ms. Rosh
were, indeed, truthful.

And Mr. Hassett and Mr. Lott said that their research is a serious
attempt to quantify political bias, an area that has rarely been
studied statistically. This hasn't convinced all critics, of course.

"To even base a story on Lott's work at this point in time is to
demonstrate a pronounced bias toward right-wing hacks," said Brad
DeLong, a liberal-leaning economist at the University of California at
Berkeley.