Media coverage of political scandals - Summary

Mass media is considered as an important source of disseminating the information about pollical
affairs; that helps the citizens in making comparisons about the news delivered and their
individual experience. Politicians strategically communicate with voters as they have no
intention of communicating their wrongdoings or crimes to the public. But it is in the control of
reporters or journalists, to decide which is newsworthy and which is not, and these choices affect
the opinions of citizens regarding political affairs.
This paper examines the coverage of political scandals for 200 US newspapers. The study
collects the data on media coverage through automated keyword-based searches of the
NewsLibrary electronic archive and focuses on scandals of political leaders. This study uses the
data to test the hypothesis regarding the political behavior of mass media and matches this data
with a measure of the explicit partisan position of each newspaper which is average propensity to
endorse democratic versus Republican candidates, and a measure of the partisanship of each
newspaper’s readers which is the propensity to vote for democratic versus republican candidates
in those areas where each newspaper is sold. This paper uses the circulation data to build the
measures of the competitiveness of each newspaper market.
The main finding of this study is that the ideological position on the ‘supply side’ has strong
correlation with the partisan coverage of scandals. Democratic-leaning newspapers will have
greater tendency to endorse democratic candidates in elections, will give more coverage to
scandals involving republican politicians than scandals involving Democratic politicians, while
Republican-leaning newspapers do the opposite, irrespective of the geographical location of the
politicians involved. Additionally, more competition reduces the supply-led bias.
This paper finds that ‘demand side’ factors play a significant role only for ‘local’ scandals.
Newspapers mainly read in Democratic areas give significantly more coverage to Republican
scandals, but only when the politicians involved in the scandal are from the same state or district
where the newspaper is sold. This difference in coverage does not hold for ‘distant’ scandals.
This study also examines that newspapers with grater circulation systematically gives more
coverage to political scandals irrespective of the political affiliations involved.