All the News That's Fit to Sell

This book develops an economic theory of news, analyses evidence across a wide range of media markets on how incentives affect news content, and offers policy conclusions. Media bias, for instance, was long a staple of the news. Hamilton's analysis of newspapers from 1870 to 1900 reveals how nonpartisan reporting became the norm. A hundred years later, some partisan elements reemerged as, for example, evening news broadcasts tried to retain young female viewers with stories aimed at their (Democratic) political interests. Examination of story selection on the network evening news programmes from 1969 to 1998 shows how cable competition, deregulation and ownership changes encouraged a shift from hard news about politics toward more soft news about entertainers.