We study the coverage of U.S. political scandals by U.S. newspapers during the past decade. Using automatic keyword-based searches we collected data on 32 scandals and approximately 200 newspapers. We find that Democratic-leaning newspapers -i.e., those with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elections -provide relatively more coverage of scandals involving Republican politicians than scandals involving Democratic politicians, while Republican-leaning newspapers tend to do the opposite. This is true even after controlling for the average partisan leanings of readers. In contrast, newspapers appear to cater to the partisan tastes of readers only for local scandals. Keywords: Media Bias; Newspapers; Corruption; Political Scandals In modern societies the mass media are citizens' most important source of information about public affairs. On some issues, such as crime or the state of the economy, citizens can compare the news provided by the media with their personal experience. On other issues, such as foreign affairs, the media are the only source of information for most of the public. Events concerning the malfeasance of public officials typically fall into the second category. Politicians may wish to communicate directly with voters about certain matters, such as popular policy decisions, but they clearly have no incentive to advertise their wrongdoings. As a result, the mass media have the potential to play a crucial role as watchdogs, informing citizens about any improper conduct by those in power. Of course, in practice the media might or might not serve as faithful watchdogs. In particular, according to the "agenda-setting" theory of mass media, editors and journalists enjoy considerable freedom in deciding what is newsworthy and what is not, and these choices affect the perception of citizens about which issues are relevant and to what extent. As pointed out by Lippmann [1922] , events regarding public affairs would be "out of reach, out of sight, out of mind" for citizens if the media happen not to cover them. In this paper we investigate the coverage of political scandals by approximatively 200 U.S. newspapers during the last decade. We collect data on media coverage through automated keyword-based searches of the NewsLibrary electronic archive, and focus on recent financial scandals involving senators, members of congress, and state governors. Exploiting the newspapers' own archives and the Factiva electronic archive we integrate our dataset with similar information on the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. Our dataset includes 32 scandals and approximately 200 newspapers. We use this data to test several hypotheses regarding the political behavior of mass media. We match this data with a measure of the explicit partisan position of each newspaper, and a measure of the partisanship of each newspaper's readers. The former is the average propensity to endorse Democratic versus Republican candidates in congressional and statewide races, and the latter is the propensity to vote for Democratic versus Republican candidates in the areas in which each newspaper is sold, weighted by circulation. We also use the circulation data to construct measures of the competitiveness of each newspaper market. The main finding of our analysis is that partisan biases exhibited on the editorial pages 1 of newspapers are strongly correlated with partisan biases in the coverage of scandals, and with the expected sign. Democratic-leaning newspapers -i.e., those with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elections -devote significantly more attention to scandals involving Republican politicians than scandals involving Democratic politicians, while Republican-leaning newspapers do the opposite. This bias in coverage of scandals is not confined to the editorial page, but also affects the news sections. The correlation holds strongly even after controlling for the partisan leanings of newspapers' readers. This suggests the bias is due at least in part to "supply side" factors. On the other hand, we find that "demand side" factors play a significant role only for local scandals. Newspapers mainly read in Democratic (Republican) areas give significantly more coverage to Republican (Democratic) scandals, but only when the politicians involved in the scandal are from the same state or congressional district where the newspaper is sold. This difference in coverage does not hold for "distant" scandals. In contrast, the supply side effect described in the previous paragraph -that Republican-endorsing newspapers systematically give more coverage to Democratic scandals, and Democratic-endorsing newspapers do the opposite -holds irrespective of the geographical location of the politicians involved. The relative frequency of stories about political scandals is on average quite small. Thus, in absolute terms the effects we measure are also small. In relative terms, however, the biases are large. Consider a newspaper with a propensity to endorse Democratic candidates that is one standard deviation higher than average. On average, this newspaper would devote 26 percent more coverage to Republican scandals than to Democratic scandals. To put this in perspective, one standard deviation in the endorsement score is what separates the Chicago Tribune from the Denver Post, and the Denver Post from the New York Times. Finally, we find some evidence that newspapers with larger circulation systematically give more space to scandals, irrespective of the political affiliation of those involved. As discussed below, there are both demand-and supply-side accounts consistent with this relationship. Our findings contribute to three lines of research on the politics and political economy of the media. The first is the growing empirical literature searching for replicable and intuitive ways to measure the ideological or partisan positions of different media outlets. The existing mea-2 sures can be divided into three types. One type focuses on the explicit political behavior of newspapers, analyzing endorsements of candidates or ballot propositions (e.g., Ansolabehere et al. 2006, Puglisi and Snyder 2009) . A second type measures the implicit political behavior of media outlets, analyzing the language they use or the sources they cite in their news stories (e.g., Gasper 2007 , Gentzkow and Shapiro 2010 , Groseclose and Milyo 2005 . The idea is to compare the words, phrases or sources used by the media with those used by politicians. Outlets that employ language or sources that are used mainly by Republican (Democratic) politicians are then classified as relatively conservative (liberal). The third type also measures the implicit political behavior of the media, but focuses on the amount of coverage devoted to various issues, that is, on "agenda-setting" (e.g., Larcinese et al. 2007 , Puglisi 2006 . The idea is to analyze how the behavior of newspapers varies as the partisan identity of the president varies. For example, Larcinese et al. (2007) study the amount of coverage devoted to economic issues, such as unemployment, inflation, and deficits. A newspaper is classified as relatively conservative (liberal) if it covers unemployment more intensely when unemployment is high and the president is a Democrat, compared to when unemployment is equally high but the president is a Republican. Our paper provides a new measure of the third type of bias. One reason to focus on agenda-setting is that abuse of this power is potentially one of the most harmful behaviors by news media, especially if it is used to suppress information. The reason is that it is difficult for consumers to distinguish the scenario "I did not see any news about X today because nothing important happened regarding X" from the alternative "I did not see any news about X today because, although something important happened, the media decided not to publish it." Theoretical models by Anderson and McLaren (2009), Bernhardt et al. (2008), Besley and Prat (2006) and Puglisi (2004) incorporate precisely this source of media bias, and show how this can lead to suboptimal public policy decisions. The second line of work to which our paper speaks is the theoretical literature on media bias. Formal models by Baron (2006) , Mullainathan and Shleifer (2005) , Gentzkow et al. We find a negative correlation between competition and supply-driven bias -consistent with the first prediction -but the relationships are rarely statistically significant. A third factor is the size and ideological composition of the media audience. A model by Larcinese (2009) predicts that newspapers that appeal to moderates or independents should tend to cover all political scandals, irrespective of the political affiliation of the politicians involved. With respect to size, it seems likely that newspapers circulating in a large city should devote more overall coverage to political scandals than newspapers in smaller cities. First, there is an obvious supply side factor -newspapers with larger circulation also have more resources, and might choose to assign more staff to investigative reporting and coverage of scandals. But there might also be demand-side reasons for such a relationship. Suppose that (i) readers are confirmation seekers who like to read about scandals involving politicians from the opposition party, and (ii) larger audiences tend to be more ideologically heterogeneous or more diverse in terms of partisanship. Then, as long as readers can simply skip over the articles covering scandals involving politicians from their preferred ideology or party (or do not dislike reading these articles too much), a newspaper catering to the larger audience is likely to find it profitable to cover scandals involving both parties' politicians, and hence will devote more coverage overall to scandals. That is, a newspaper that initially covered only Republican scandals would increase its profits if it decided to cover Democratic 4 scandals as well, because it would gain more readers among Republicans than it would lose among Democrats. We find evidence consistent with both of these predictions. The third line of work to which we contribute is the research on media coverage of political scandals. In this literature the Watergate affair looms large, as it stimulated interest in how scandals are covered -and sometimes even uncovered -by the mass media. The causes and consequences of Watergate have been widely investigated, and in some cases Watergate is used as a benchmark against which other scandals are to be compared. 5 One issue debated in the political science and communications literatures is whether the mass media act as efficient watchdogs in their coverage of political scandals, or whether they instead inject an excessive dose of sensationalism, making the public skeptical and ultimately cynical and unresponsive. dominated by partisan newspapers -was more biased than the coverage of Teapot Domewhich occurred at a time when fewer dailies were directly linked to political parties. Our contribution to this literature is to add breadth, analyzing coverage for a large number of newspapers and a large number of recent political scandals. By using automatic keyword-based searches, we provide an easily replicable and relatively precise way to estimate the importance of some of the key factors that drive the coverage of political scandals. We use objective criteria to generate a sample of relatively comparable scandals, and then measure the coverage of all scandals satisfying the selected criteria on all newspapers that are available in the NewsLibrary archive (plus the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, which we add because they are the largest newspapers in the U.S. that endorse candidates but are not searchable through NewsLibrary). Thus, we provide a good example of the benefits of automated text-classification procedures. 7 In the empirical analysis, in order to minimize potential selection bias we include a given gation was still ongoing at that date. 12 The politicians in our sample have prominent public roles which make them newsworthy for a variety of reasons. In order to restrict attention to articles covering the scandals themselves, we code an article as being about the scandal if the name of the person involved appears together with the one or more of the following words (*'s are wildcards): investigat*, indict*, convict*, guilty, resign*, brib*, ethic*, corrupt*, conspir*, prison, scandal*. To find opinion articles we added the following qualifiers to the "Topic" and "Section" fields in the search: opinion, editorial, comment, commentary, perspective, viewpoint, forum, ideas, citizen voices, sunday punch. 13 We define "news" articles all non-opinion articles. 14 Since newspapers vary greatly in size cross-sectionally (total number of pages, stories, and words), and can also vary in size over time, we focus on the relative frequency of articles about a scandal in each newspaper during the relevant time window. In order to do so, we proxy the total number of articles in each newspaper in each time period by running a search on the word "and." We do the same for opinion pieces, by adding the qualifiers listed above to the "Topic" and "Section" fields when searching for the word "and." The first half of Table A1 in the online appendix displays summary statistics on scandal coverage for those newspapers that we were able to match with endorsement and readership data. We express relative frequencies of stories in percentage points, and distinguish between total hits, articles and editorials. Overall, scandal stories make up a very small fraction of the total: on average there are around two and a half hits every 10,000 stories. This figure is much higher for editorials (something more than one editorial every 1,000). For all three categories of hits, the distribution is strongly skewed to the right, as witnessed by the large differences between means and medians. In order to control for the relative localness of a scandal, we construct the dummy variable Instate, which equals one when the politician involved in scandal i is from the state where newspaper j is located. In a similar fashion Local is a dummy which equals one when the politician involved in scandal i is from a congressional district that overlaps heavily with the market area of newspaper j (for congressional scandals). Summary statistics on these variables are again reported in the first half of Table A1 . As mentioned, we match data on the coverage of scandals with information on the en-7 dorsement propensity of each newspaper. 15 The main source of endorsement data is Ansolabehere et al. (2006), which we supplement with additional information obtained via searches on the NewsLibrary archive. We define the "partisan bias" of a newspaper as the propensity for the newspaper to endorse one of the parties during electoral campaigns, controlling for the quality of candidates and their incumbency status. We used a linear regression model to estimate these biases. Let i index offices, let j index newspapers and let t index years. Let  The newspaper-specific fixed effects, N E j , capture newspapers' partisanship. 19 Overall, we have sufficient data on both endorsements and scandal coverage for 213 newspapers. We measure the average partisanship of each newspapers' readers as follows. Table A1 in the online appendix. We begin with a simple and intuitive two-stage analysis. First we separately estimate newspaper-specific propensities to cover Democratic and Republican scandals, controlling for factors such as whether the scandal involves a politician from the same state or city as the newspaper. Then we regress the difference in these estimated propensities against our measures of endorsement partisanship and reader partisanship. More precisely, for each Democratic scandal i = 1, ..., 13, let n D ij be the relative frequency of articles published by newspaper j about scandal i during the relevant time window. Define n R ij similarly, for each Republican scandal i = 1, ..., 19. We run the following two panel regressions: where α D i and α R i are scandal-specific fixed effects; β D j and β R j are newspaper-specific fixed effects; the Instate and the Local dummy variables are described above. Since we have data not only on the overall coverage of scandals on the newspaper, but separate information on the coverage devoted on the editorial page and on the news section, we can perform these regressions on three different items: relative frequencies of total hits, relative frequencies of news hits, and relative frequencies of opinion hits. Our focus is on the differential coverage of Republican and Democratic scandals by the different newspapers, which we can compute from the newspaper-specific fixed effects. Let Once we obtain these newspaper-specific measures of slanted coverage, we check how they correlate with the explicit partisan position of each newspaper, as proxied by its endorsement pattern, and with the political leaning of consumers. The results are shown in Table 2 . We present results for three dependent variables: total hits, news hits and editorial hits. For each dependent variable we present the results of four regressions: in the first we simply regressŝ j against the endorsement partisanship N E j and a constant, in the second we do the same with reader partisanship N R j , in the third we control for both N E j and N R j , and in the fourth we add total average circulation as an additional control, expressed in thousands of yearly copies. The main finding is that pro-Democratic coverage of scandals is significantly and positively correlated with a pro-Democratic endorsement pattern: newspapers with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates give relatively more coverage to scandals involving Republican politicians than scandals involving Democratic politicians, while Republicanleaning newspapers do the opposite. This is robust across specifications, and is consistent with supply-driven models of media bias. Regarding the partisanship of demand, there is no statistically significant relationship with the dependent variable. However, when controlling for endorsement partisanship the point estimate suggests that the Democratic partisanship of readers is negatively correlated with pro-Democratic coverage of scandals. As discussed above, competitive pressure in the media market should compress the bias in coverage if the latter originates from the ideological position on the supply side. The same is true if newspapers face Bayesian consumers who are uncertain about the quality of news reporting, as in Gentzkow and Shapiro (2006) . On the other hand, competition would exacerbate bias if newspapers cater to confirmation-seeking readers. To shed some empirical light on these contrasting predictions, we checked whether the partial correlation ofŝ j with our measures of endorsement and reader partisanship is weaker or stronger in more competitive media environments. We consistently find a negative relationship -implying that more competition reduces supply-led bias -but the coefficients are rarely statistically significant at the .05 level. 25 In this section we pool all of the data and perform a one-stage analysis with interaction terms. This is an alternative and more direct way to estimate whether the coverage of Democratic and Republican scandals of the various newspapers differs as a function of the endorsement score and the ideological leaning of readers. It also allows to delve further into the data, and investigate whether demand-driven or supply-led coverage bias is a function of specific features of the scandals themselves, such as their location. Since we are exploiting the differential coverage of Republican and Democratic scandals by each newspaper, it is possible to include newspaper-specific fixed effects. More specifically, we run the following regression: where RS i is a dummy which equals one when scandal i involves a Republican politician, and minus one when it involves a Democrat. We also run a regression in which we instead control for the interaction with the reader partisanship variable N R j , and a third one where 11 both interactions are included. In a fourth specification we check whether the slant in the coverage of scandals depends on the localness of the scandal itself. We do so by adding two triple interactions between N E j (N R j ), RS i and a dummy which equals one if the politician involved in scandal i is from the state where newspaper j is located or from a congressional district that overlaps heavily with the market area of newspaper j. As in the previous section we separately consider total hits, news articles and editorials. Also, to account for the possibility that the error terms across observations are correlated within newspapers, we compute standard errors that are clustered by newspaper. The results are shown in Table 3 . The relative frequency of hits -for total hits, news hits, and editorial hits -is always positively and significantly correlated with the interaction between the endorsement score and the Republican scandal dummy. This corresponds to what we found in the two stage analysis. Moreover, the interaction between the partisanship of readers and the Republican dummy is negatively correlated with n ij , although this coefficient is statistically insignificant. However, when allowing for a differential partisan behavior for local and non local scandals, we find that newspapers mainly read in Democratic (Republican) areas devote significantly more coverage only to those Republican (Democratic) scandals which involve local politicians. Interestingly, this demand-driven coverage bias does not occur on the editorial page, but only in the news section (and with total hits, as the latter effect dominates the former). On the other hand, supply-led coverage bias is not confined to local scandals, as shown by the positive and statistically significant coefficient on the simple interaction between N E j and RS i . The triple interaction of N E j with the "localness" dummy is positive, but not significant. A plausible interpretation of these results is that newspapers would pander to the ideological tastes of readers only by slanting news material which is already known to them. On the other hand, editors and journalists pursuing a partisan bias in their coverage appear to be making use of any news material that is suitable to the purpose, whether local or not.  In this section we explore the robustness of our findings on coverage bias. As pointed out in the data section, we are particularly concerned with potential selection bias regarding the scandals under consideration. At the outset, one must however notice that selection bias would be a much more serious problem if we were trying to estimate the "absolute" level of newspaper bias, i.e. whether U.S. newspapers overall display a liberal or a conservative slant in the coverage of scandals. However, our research question is different, since it involves the relative amount of bias across newspapers and its correlates, and hence is much less prone to the distortions induced by selection bias. In order to further deal with this issue, we run several robust checks conditional on our sample. This would also allow to check whether the average behavior of newspapers across scandals is in fact a combination of largely different "treatments" newspapers devote to heterogenous types of scandals. The time periods of the various scandals is a first source of heterogeneity. In our case, all scandals except those involving Democratic politicians James Traficant (Rep-OH) and Edwin Edwards (Gov-LA) began after George W. Bush became president in 2000. A potential concern is that newspapers might be differentially covering political scandals as a function of the match between their political affiliation (as proxied by the endorsement score) and the overall partisan climate at the federal level, which is of course heavily influenced by the political affiliation of the incumbent president. If, for example, newspapers are more 13 aggressive in the bias of their coverage of scandals when the president belongs to the least favorite political party, then the average differential coverage of scandals might change when the president changes. This would not affect our estimates of the relative partisan bias, but one cannot exclude the further possibility that Democratic-endorsing and Republicanendorsing outlets react to a change in the political affiliation of the president with a different degree of aggressiveness, hence confounding our results. Again separately displaying results for total hits, news articles and opinion pieces, Table   4 presents the outcome of this robustness check in the first column of each subgroup, whereas we exclude the Traficant and Edwards scandals from the analysis. Throughout, we adopt the more general specification where we jointly control for endorsement and reader partisanship, and their triple interactions with the localness dummy. The results are very similar -in terms of magnitude and statistical significance -to those reported in Table 3 . As an additional check on the robustness of our results to sample selection -and to influential outliers -in an online appendix we drop scandals one at a time (Tables A2, A3 and A4). We do this separately for total hits, news and editorials, and focus on the fuller specification, whereas we include triple interactions of the endorsement partisanship variable (and readership partisanship) with the Republican scandal and the localness dummies (see columns 4, 8 and 12 in Table 3 ). The estimated coefficients are remarkably stable in their sign, magnitude and significance throughout the tables. Up to now, we have attached the same weight to all scandals within each party, irrespective of the ideology of the politicians involved. However, it might be more rewarding for a Democratic-leaning (Republican-leaning) newspaper to cover scandals involving staunchly conservative Republicans (liberal Democrats) rather than moderate ones. This logic would also apply to demand-side forces driving newspapers to cater to confirmation-seeking readers. Poole and Rosenthal's (1997) NOMINATE scores provide a widely used measure of the ideological locations of all of the politicians who served in the U.S. Congress. 31,32 For the 27 politicians to whom we can attach a NOMINATE common space score, we check whether the amount of coverage devoted by a Democratic-endorsing newspaper to a given scandal is increasing in the ideological conservativeness of the involved politician (as proxied by the NOMINATE score), and vice versa for a Republican-endorsing newspaper. In order 14 to implement this type of analysis, we simply run a specification similar to (??), with the RS i dummy replaced by the NOMINATE common space score. The last column for each subgroup of news items in Table 4 reports the findings of this last robustness check. The interaction between the endorsement score and the NOMINATE common space score has a positive coefficient, which is significant for hits and news, but not for editorials. In the case of editorials, the triple interaction with the localness dummy is now significant at the 10 percent confidence level. On the other hand, the interaction of the NOMINATE score with the reader partisanship variable is negatively and insignificantly correlated with coverage, similar to what we found in the baseline specification. As noted in the introduction, if the demand for information by consumers is what drives mass media behavior, then newspapers appealing to moderate voters should devote more total coverage to political scandals, irrespective of the political affiliation of the public officials involved. 33 Also, under reasonable conditions, newspapers that are read by larger and ideologically more heterogeneous audiences would find it profitable to cover all scandals, in order to satisfy (to some extent) all customers. To assess these hypotheses, in this section we analyze the overall coverage of scandals. The specifications are analogous to equations (2)- (4) Since our focus in this case is on newspaper-specific variables such as total circulation and reader moderateness, we cannot use fixed effects at the newspaper level. Instead, we run the following regression: Again, we estimate the partisan coverage of scandals by interacting the Republican scandal dummy with N R j and N E j . Standard errors are again clustered at the newspaper level. 15 Table 5 displays the results. For each category of hits (total hits, articles and editorials) in the first specification we include only the circulation measure; we then add the voter standard deviation variable. As in the two stage analysis, circulation is positively and significantly correlated with overall coverage in the case of total hits and news hits, but it is not significant for editorials. On the other hand, the voter standard deviation variable is positively and significantly correlated with coverage, mildly so for total hits and news, strongly so for editorials. Finally, it is still the case that the interaction between endorsement partisanship and the Republican scandal dummy is positively and significantly correlated with coverage, while the interaction with reader partisanship is negatively and insignificantly correlated. In this paper we have analysed the coverage of political scandals by a large number of U.S. newspapers, focusing on supply and demand side determinants of any partisan bias in this coverage. As discussed above, the use of automated keyword-based searches of the online news archives (in our case: the NewsLibrary archive, plus Factiva and the newspaper's own archive for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune) allows us to systematically investigate how U.S. newspapers covered all recent and salient political scandals involving senators, members of congress or state governors (plus Jack Abramoff). The main finding is that there is a strong correlation between the partisan leaning of newspapers as measured by their endorsement behavior, and the partisan bias in their coverage of political scandals. Specifically, Democratic-leaning newspapers -i.e., those with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elections -give significantly more coverage to scandals involving Republican politicians than scandals involving Democratic politicians, while Republican-leaning newspapers behave in the opposite way. This bias in the coverage of scandals is not confined to the editorial page, but also affects the news section. While the fraction of stories devoted to political scandals is on average very small, the magnitude of the coverage bias effect is large in relative terms: a one-standard-deviation increase in a newspaper's propensity to endorse Democratic candidates is associated with an increase in differential coverage of Republican versus Democratic scandals of 26 percent. We also find evidence that biased coverage of scandals "panders" to the partisan leaning We also find some evidence regarding factors that are correlated with the overall coverage of scandals. Newspapers with higher circulation systematically devote more coverage to political scandals, at least in the news section. Further work is needed to distinguish between demand-driven and supply-led accounts for this relationship. Finally, regarding the issue of competition, we find no robust effects on bias or overall coverage. This may be in due in part to the fact that in the period we study most U.S. newspaper markets are relatively uncompetitive. Thus, it will be interesting to study earlier time periods, when the number of newspapers was larger and there was probably more variation in the degree of competition across cities. 35 In addition, with historical data there are potential quasi-experiments we can exploit to better identify the effects of competition on media coverage. One is the demise of afternoon newspapers. Many scholars argue that this was caused by the spread of television and/or lifestyle changes, and therefore the decline can be treated as an exogenous shock to newspaper markets. If so, we can obtain a clean estimate of the effects of competition by comparing changes in newspaper coverage across cities with different initial numbers of afternoon newspapers. One obvious weakness of our approach is that is purely cross-sectional. This is especially important since one of our goals is to begin disentangling the relative importance of demand and supply factors in affecting the bias in the coverage of scandals. As shown by Figure   1 , in the cross section of newspapers there is a positive and significant correlation between endorsement and reader partisanship, which is consistent with many of the theoretical models discussed in the introduction. However, this correlation is rather low, i.e. there is a sizeable "slack" between the partisan position on the demand and the supply side. We exploit this 17 slack in order to try and distinguish the correlation of slanted coverage with the ideological stance on the demand and on the supply side. From this point of view, it is especially interesting to notice that endorsement and reader partisanship are correlated with scandal coverage in distinct ways: unconditionally so for endorsement partisanship, only for local scandals in the case of reader partisanship. Given that we do not have a proper experiment or natural experiment, however, we cannot conclude that ideology on either the supply or demand side of the newspaper market has a causal effect on scandal coverage. We are more confident asserting that the correlations we find cast doubt on one of the basic tenets of a free press -the duty of the press to behave as watchdogs vis a vis incumbent politicians. Newspapers cover political scandals, but they do so in systematically biased ways, which appear to depend on the partisan positions of their publishers, editors, and readers. One issue we do not address, but which would be interesting for future work, is whether the amount and bias of coverage varies across different types of scandals. In particular, sex scandals might be different than financial scandals, since "sex sells." In addition, the power of the office held by the person involved in the scandal may have a significant influence not only on the amount of coverage but also on bias. It may be much easier for publishers, editors, and journalists to "pick and choose" which scandals to cover when the scandals involve low-level officials in other states or areas. Thus, there might be even more bias in the coverage of low-level scandals than in the relatively high-level scandals studied here. 1 Although the relationship between endorsement behavior and readers' partisanship is positive and statistically significant, the correlation is only about 0.3. This suggests that the endorsement behavior of a given newspaper is a reasonable indicator of "supply side" forces pinning down its editorial position. We discuss this in more detail in the next section. (2002), not only can mass media coverage highlight some topic as an object of attention, but the coverage can also emphasize particular attributes of the topic, making these attributes more salient. The theory of issue priming describes how readers and viewers, when assessing a given situation or individual, are pushed towards giving a higher weight to the aspect emphasized by the mass media. See Krosnick and Miller (1996) for a review of this literature. 4 In addition to the literature in communications studies on agenda-setting and framing
For instance, by tracing the media coverage of 32 handpicked scandal stories, it was shown that outlets with a conservative slant are more likely to cover scandals involving liberal politicians, and vice-versa REF .
Newspaper Coverage of Political Scandals
The Journal of Politics
Political Science