The Decline of Evening Newspapers: Partisan Slant's Impact on Election Results

• In Event: The Electoral Impacts of Media and Messaging

Abstract

In this paper, we assess the impact that partisan bias in local newspaper has on election outcomes. We use local newspaper endorsements of candidates to measure partisan bias and use newspaper circulation merged to county-level election outcomes for Congress and statewide elected offices to estimate the effect of media bias on election results between 1950-2002. To account for confounding factors, we construct a Bartik “shift-share” style instrument for a county’s local newspaper bias, which exploits changes in counties’ overall local news bias due to a nationwide decline in circulation from local newspapers that were delivered in the evening. The national decline of evening newspapers started in 1980; before 1980, about 50% of all newspaper circulation was delivered in the evening, but by 2004, evening newspaper circulation was less than 10%. Conditional on the partisan bias of the evening newspaper in a county before 1980, this national decline in evening news provides a more plausibly exogenous shift in local media bias – making the overall local news in a county more Republican-leaning if the evening newspaper was a Democratic paper, and more Democratic-leaning if the evening newspaper was a Republican paper. In preliminary results, we find that the partisan slant of local news has a small but significant impact on the voting behavior and election outcomes.

Authors

• Tyler Simko, Harvard University

• James M. Snyder, Harvard University

• BK Song, Sogang University

• Kevin DeLuca, Yale University