Yes, it’s a joke of a question. Now, here’s the punchline.

The New York Times reports on a new study (PDF) from the University of Chicago on the political bias of newspapers. The study found that newspapers are indeed politically biased, but that the slant reflects the feelings of the paper’s subscriber base. Here’s the key quote from the Times’ piece:

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 Dr. Shapiro put it in 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.”

Give the people what they want I guess, concludes Todd Zeigler.

[via The Bivings Report]

We, on the other hand, question what comes first: are newspapers catering to their customers, or are newspapers responsible for shaping the political perspectives of their readers? It’s self-fulfilling.

People who religiously read the NYT (and we know some), they consider it to be the definitive source of news. They think Paul Krugman is a genius, and they believe everything he says without question. There is no intellectual rigor, no comparing or contrasting. And, of course, their politics follows suit.

If we consider the world of all other media - television, radio, advertising - consumer tastes are developed by what they read, hear and see. Media shapes public opinion. That’s fact.

So the argument of newspapers merely slanting “to their customers’ demand” seems fallacious.

That would be like saying public school teachers are inherently liberal because students and their parents want them to use the classrooms to proselytize. Not true. And, yet, no better example of shaping you minds.

From the classroom to the newsroom.

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1. It can also be said that the major media are slanted decidedly to the left because they feed the major population centers of the nation, and with few exceptions the major population centers lean toward the left.

   But that brings us back to the question: do those populations lean left because they sheepishly believe all that is printed, or do the papers simply feed the populations’ biases? Without any data to back it up, my guess is that the papers led them down the rosy path…

   Comment by Carlos — December 8, 2006 @ 5:27 pm

2. UCLA did a serious study a few years back and concluded “yes.”

   Comment by wallace — December 8, 2006 @ 9:23 pm

3. The UCLA study was not only newspapers, but all media outlets.

   One could make the argument that the newspapers are not shaping their readers, and aren’t catering to their audience, but rather only have subscribers with similar slants. There is a distinct difference here.

   Comment by thegentlecricket — December 8, 2006 @ 11:41 pm