The Business of Politics: Analyzing Partisan Slant on 24-Hour Business Networks

• In Event: Bias, Media Bias, and Nothing but Bias

Abstract

Introduction

Do 24-hour business news channels exhibit partisan slant? Americans are becoming increasingly interested in business and stock market developments, thanks in part to the rise of commission-free trading platforms. But as citizens turn their attention to business news, they may not expect to discover partisan-congenial narratives and intense political framing efforts—effects that are consequential for economic voting behavior. In this paper I evaluate partisan responsibility attributions for economic conditions in 24-hour business news. Relying on automated and qualitative content analyses of cable news transcripts from CNBC (N = 13,590) and Bloomberg TV (N = 44,051), I demonstrate that responsibility attributions for economic conditions are prevalent in business news. These attributions tend to favor Republican positions more often than Democratic ones. Blame and credit attributions are often forwarded in business coverage by CEOs and business leaders in interview segments. Together, the results indicate that business news is an overlooked source of partisan influence for an attentive audience of retail investors, analysts, and businesspeople. This slanted coverage may also have spillover effects on other media sources due to business channels’ role in setting the economic news agenda.

Background

Business news channels are expected to provide audiences with slanted pro-Republican coverage because business audiences are ideologically nonmedian. CNBC’s audience has the 6th most conservative audience among the top 20 news outlets (Flaxman et al. 2016). Gentzkow and Shapiro’s (2011) study of the MRI Survey of the American Consumer estimates that CNBC (66% conservative) and Bloomberg TV (74% conservative) have audiences with majority conservative audiences. These proportions of conservative viewers are comparable to the Wall Street Journal’s readership (68% conservative) and even approach the rightwing audience of the Fox News Channel (81% conservative).

Studies of CNBC have also examined the role of interviews in driving audience reactions on the network. Some studies have shown that CEO appearances affect stock prices of the CEOs’ companies (Fang & Peress 2010; Kim 2013), while others have identified political reactions to guest appearances. Rafail and McCarthy (2018), for instance, posit that Rick Santelli’s CNBC appearance in 2009 played a pivotal role in sparking the Tea Party Patriots movement. However, no existing study has analyzed political slant in business coverage.

Methods and Data

Following literature on the tone of economic news coverage (e.g., Merkley 2019; Soroka 2006; 2012), I argue that story tone and partisan responsibility attributions interact to drive slant in business network coverage. I employ three methods to examine the interaction between these two features of news coverage. First is an automated content analytical approach that examines business news tone as a function of presidential incumbency and the real economy (Merkley 2019).

Next, I employ a manual content analysis that examines the content surrounding mentions of Republicans and Democrats in detail (e.g., Hayes 2008; Kane 2020; Wagner and Gruszczynski 2018). This analysis codes the speaker, the positive/negative valence of each mention, whether the mention blames or credits economic conditions to Democrats or Republicans, and whether these blame/credit attributions target present or past political incumbents.

Finally, I use the results of the manual content analysis to validate an automated approach that estimates the patterns of blame and credit in a larger sample of business news. This approach uses features of the sentences in which partisan actors were mentioned to estimate the probability of a credit or blame attribution in each instance.

I apply these methods to two datasets, both gathered from the Nexis Uni database. The first is a sample of 13,590 CNBC transcripts spanning the years from 1998 to 2016. The second is a sample of 44,051 Bloomberg TV transcripts, which span the years from 2009 to 2018, and which allows for a comparison between the Obama administration and the first two years of the Trump regime.

Preliminary Findings

Preliminary results provide evidence in favor of the pro-Republican slant hypothesis. Automated content analytical results show that net of the movement of the real economy, business news exhibits more positive tone during Republican administrations when compared to Democratic ones. Qualitative content analysis shows that business news interviewees more frequently give credit for positive economic developments to Republicans during periods of Republican incumbency than Democrats. They are also more likely to give credit for positive developments to former Republican incumbents during periods of Democratic incumbency. The results indicate that business news channels are an unheralded, and increasingly salient, source of partisan slant in the realm of economic news.

Author

• Ian G. Anson, University of Maryland, Baltimore County