(Page 3 of 49) - Being the New York Times: the Political Behaviour of a Newspaper authored by Puglisi, Riccardo.

is the highest among US dailies

. Lastly, on top of its direct agenda-setting

role towards readers, it is well known that many other newspapers follow
the lead of the New York Times, by featuring stories and topics previously
published on it. This phenomenon, which is described as inter media agenda-
setting, should amplify the newspaper’s inﬂuence on the public agenda.

The crucial point is to consistently attribute a political connotation to

the topics being covered by the newspaper in the time series. According to
the issue ownership hypothesis, as formulated by Petrocik [1996], voters have
a priori views on which political party is better able of handling problems
related to a given issue. On some issues the ownership status is a long
term aspect, in the sense that across time the majority of voters consistently
thinks that a given party is better than the other(s). In the US context,
voters on average reckon that a Democratic candidate is better suitable of
handling social welfare issues like civil rights, health care and labour, while
a Republican one is perceived as better able of handling problems related to
domestic and international security, namely the law and crime and defense
issues. A problem with Petrocik’s claims about the issue ownership status
is that he substantiates them with survey data that cover a very short time
period, namely from 1988 to 1991: my contribution to this literature is to
present survey data from Gallup and the National Election Study which cover
a much longer time period than Petrocik’s.

Indeed, the data I gather broadly conﬁrm, with some qualiﬁcations, the

issue ownership pattern suggested by Petrocik, projecting it back to 1972 for
the issues of social welfare and crime, to 1956 for civil rights, and to 1952 for
defense.

As mentioned above, in this paper I check whether during the presidential

campaign the New York Times has a partisan behaviour, namely whether it
gives more emphasis to issues that are owned by a given party, at the expense
of issues owned by the other.

Moreover, just because the political identity of the incumbent president

has been predetermined four years before, I study whether the issue balance
of stories chosen by the New York Times during the presidential campaign is
inﬂuenced by the political aﬃliation of the incumbent president. Here some
competing hypotheses can be brought to the data: during the presidential
campaign the New York Times may act as a watchdog, in that, over and
above its partisan component, it gives more emphasis to the issues over which

For details see http://www.nytco.com/company-awards-times.html.