(Page 2 of 49) - Being the New York Times: the Political Behaviour of a Newspaper authored by Puglisi, Riccardo.

state of aﬀairs, the incumbent politicians’ performance and the behaviour of
candidates during the electoral campaign. Moreover, according to the theory
of agenda-setting eﬀects, mass media outlets can inﬂuence the agenda of the
public, by tilting it towards those issues that they decide to cover more ex-
tensively. Such agenda-setting ability could have relevant electoral eﬀects, to
the extent that citizens on average think that a given party or candidate is
more capable of handling problems related to a given issue, and would vote
for that party if such issue turns out to be the most salient one.

Yet, there is very little evidence on whether and how mass media make use

of their agenda-setting power, perhaps in a strategic fashion. In fact, there
is a large empirical literature about agenda-setting proper, namely about
the causal correlation between issue coverage by mass media outlets and the
structure of priorities entertained by readers and viewers. However, apart
from some anedoctical evidence, almost nobody has looked at the behaviour
itself of news providers within an agenda-setting framework. In other words,
taking as given the agenda-setting power thereof, one would like to look at
the editorial choices of news providers across time and in the cross section.

This paper tries to ﬁll this gap by analysing a large dataset of stories on

the New York Times, collected by Baumgartner and Jones, and spanning a
period from 1946 to 1994. The focus of the paper is on the editorial choices
of the New York Times, in terms of the topics being addressed out of and
during the presidential campaigns, and as a function of the political aﬃliation
of the incumbent president. The idea is to empirically check whether the New
York Times displays some kind of strategic behaviour during the presidential
campaign, by giving additional emphasis to issues which, if salient, would
give an electoral advantage to the Democrat or the Republican candidate.
The presidential campaign period should matter, because it is likely that the
attention of citizens towards the electoral choice swiftly increases as elections
draw nearer. The demand for electorally relevant pieces of information should
indeed follow a similar time path.

Setting aside the problem of data availability, the analysis of the New York

Times’ editorial choices is per se worthwhile, for a set of reasons: ﬁrst of all,
the New York Times is perhaps the most important newspaper in the United
States: indeed, during the time period covered by the dataset the New York
Times was the top newspaper in terms of circulation, with ... copies being
sold. Moreover, apart from recent scandals involving some of its reporters,
the reputation of the New York Times for high quality reporting is witnessed
by the number of Pulitzer Prizes being awarded to its journalists (90), which