Media concern about Murdoch interference with the WSJ has gotten so intense that they're even worried about supposed interference that amounts to trying to keep the Journal's current reporters. John Carney at Dealbreaker notes:
We’re not sure why this is anything but a positive story for the Journal, its editors, its reports and its readers. As we maintained from the beginning, Murdoch did not come to destroy the Journal but to own it. And now he’s personally reaching out to reporters in an attempt to keep it intact. But there’s already a movement to make something scandalous of these moves. “Some journalists in the newsroom took the gesture as a sign of Murdoch's commitment to keep the staff's quality high. Others said it showed that Murdoch would take a hands-on approach in newsroom affairs despite a special committee established to keep him from interfering in coverage,” the LA Times reports. Heaven forbid! The owner is trying to keep his top reporters! It’s a clear violation of the editorial integrity of the newspaper, which apparently now means letting the newsroom fall report.
Some recent theoretical and empirical supports Carney's sanguinity about the situation: Gentzkow and Shapiro, What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from U.S. Daily Newspapers. As I've previously noted, G & S have what might be called a market-based theory of media of bias -- that is, the media are biased because their customers are. Now they have some evidence. Here's some of the abstract:
We construct a new index of media slant that measures whether a news outlets language is more similar to that of a congressional Republican or Democrat. * * * Our analysis confirms an economically significant demand for news slanted toward one's own political ideology. Firms respond strongly to consumer preferences, which account for roughly 20 percent of the variation in measured slant in our sample. By contrast, the identity of a newspaper's owner explains far less of the variation in slant. We also present evidence on the role of pressure from incumbent politicians, tastes of reporters, and newspaper competition in determining slant.
Also from the article:
Using zipcode-level data on newspaper circulation, we show that right-wing newspapers circulate relatively more in zipcodes with a higher proportion of Republicans, even within a narrowly defined geographic market. * * *
To address the possibility that newspapers are creating slanted consumer attitudes, G & S
show that the relationship survives when we instrument for consumer political attitudes using characteristics such as religiosity and race that are strong predictors of political preferences but are unlikely to be a¤ected by newspaper content.* * *
G & S also note that "after controlling for geographic clustering of newspaper ownership groups, the slant of co-owned papers is only weakly (and statistically insignificantly) related to a news- paper's political alignment."
G & S conclude that their "findings suggest that ownership diversity may not be a critical precondition for ideological diversity in the media."
All of which is not to say that media bias is not a problem. Even if it's market rather than owner driven, many individuals in the market may not be fully served by the major sources, and this affect readers' views.
But the appropriate solution isn't government regulation of media ownership. Rather, as I suggest in the above-linked post, and in articles referred to in that post, blogs can add a diversity of views the major media cannot provide.
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