Liberal Politicians are Referred to More Often in News

8 Jul

The median Democrat referred to in television news is to the left of the House Democratic Median, and the median Republican politician referred to is to the left of the House Republican Median.

Click here for the aggregate distribution.

And here’s a plot of top 50 politicians cited in news. The plot shows a strong right skewed distribution with a bias towards executives.

Data:
News data: UCLA Television News Archive, which includes closed-caption transcripts of all national, cable and local (Los Angeles) news from 2006 to early 2013. In all, there are 155,814 transcripts of news shows.

Politician data: Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections (see Bonica 2012).

Note:
Taking out data from local news channels or removing Obama does little to change the pattern in the aggregate distribution.