Larvatus Prodeo

Blogging academics Joshua Gans of Melbourne University and Andrew Leigh of ANU have conducted a study into ‘media slant’ in Australian political coverage:

Australian journalists are close to the centre of the political spectrum, but their editors are more likely to take a party line, according to new research from The Australian National University.

The study, conducted by ANU economist Professor Andrew Leigh from the Research School of Social Sciences and Melbourne Business School economist Professor Joshua Gans, used a number of different approaches to measure ‘media slant’ in newspapers, radio and television.

Professors Leigh and Gans used three approaches to test for media slant; reviewing media mentions of 100 public intellectuals, rating election stories and rating newspaper headlines. The researchers found that although most media outlets showed no significant slant in reporting, there were some notable exceptions.

“In terms of content, Australian journalists seem to be a centrist bunch”, said Professor Leigh. “Using the first approach, only one out of 27 news outlets had a significant slant. This is ABC Television News, which had a significant slant towards the Coalition in the period 1999-2007. All other outlets (including six ABC radio stations) were essentially centrist.

I can’t say that the findings about the pro-Coalition bias of the ABC television news are greatly surprising to me, though they seem to have ruffled some right wing feathers.

The full paper can be accessed here.