Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/235313 
Year of Publication: 
2021
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 8943
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
We present a new measure for the political position of news outlets based on politicians' selective sharing of news items. Politicians predominantly share news items that are in line with their political position, hence, one can infer the political position of news outlets from the politicians' revealed preferences over news items. We apply our measure to twelve major German media outlets by analyzing tweets of German Members of Parliament (MPs) on Twitter. For each news outlet under consideration, we compute the correlation between the political position of the seven parties in the 19th German Bundestag and their MPs' relative number of Twitter referrals to that outlet. We find that three outlets are positioned on the left, and two of them are positioned on the right. Several robustness checks support our results. We also apply our procedure to nine major media outlets from the USA and find that two outlets are positioned on the right, five are positioned on the left of the political spectrum.
Subjects: 
political media bias
political position
selective sharing
social media
Twitter
JEL: 
H41
L82
L86
P16
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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