Measuring Explicit Political Positions of Media

Author(s): Daniel E. Ho;Kevin M. Quinn

Source:
    Journal:Quarterly Journal of Political Science
    ISSN Print:1554-0626,  ISSN Online:1554-0634
    Publisher:Now Publishers
    Volume 3 Number 4,
Pages: 25 (353-377)
DOI: 10.1561/100.00008048

Abstract: We amass a new, large-scale dataset of newspaper editorials that allows us to calculate fine-grained measures of thepolitical positions of newspaper editorial pages. Collecting and classifying over 1500 editorials adopted by 25 majorUS newspapers on 495 Supreme Court cases from 1994 to 2004, we apply an item response theoretic approach to place newspapereditorial boards on a substantively meaningful — and long validated— scale of political preferences. We validatethe measures, show how they can be used to shed light on the permeability of the wall between news and editorial desks, andargue that the general strategy we employ has great potential for more widespread use.

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