Beware of Media Bias: Why Do Newspapers Endorse Candidates?

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FILE – A voter approaches a booth to fill out a school ballot. (Photo: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

Newspapers have historically supported political candidates, and while the insights of print publications can be a helpful resource for readers, the study examined the relationship between newspaper endorsements and its impact on media partisanship.

In Harvard study published in 2023lead researcher Kevin DeLuca, a professor of political science at Yale, assessed how newspapers can be biased in their preferences for one political candidate over another.

DeLuca evaluates the quality of a political candidate and whether it may influence the candidate’s support in the press and whether it may influence publication bias.

According to the study, newspapers recommend candidates based on their pre-election coverage of them, which provides a service to readers who do not have time to study the candidate or the election and rely on the newspaper’s information. The newspaper will then publish an editorial justifying its support to its readers.

The study defined candidate quality as the characteristics of political candidates that make them better at governing, such as competence, experience and lack of corruption.

The report also indicated that if newspapers favor a particular political candidate, it may reflect the newspaper’s bias influencing their support, without taking into account the characteristics of a political candidate necessary to run for office.

One example used in the study illustrates that if a Democratic candidate receives a significant amount of support, including from newspapers that typically support Republican candidates, that means the Democrat is a “high-quality candidate” and “the Republican is a low-quality candidate.”

To assess candidate quality, the study included data on more than 22,000 endorsements of political candidates in local newspapers. These recommendations come from over 400 different newspapers from 1950 to 2022 and include recommendations during thousands of elections in all offices, from the president to local government positions.