Series: Working Papers. 1817.
Author: Sandra García-Uribe.
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Abstract
Are editors’ choices of front page news based on the potential complementarities between
the news items? This paper studies front page choices made by editors of major newspapers
in the US. I document that newspapers front pages are biased to certain combinations of
news on top of biased to certain news. To identify my measures of bias, I exploit the variation
in news relevance across different topics and days. To measure the news relevance I use lead
news choices of other US mass media. As a consequence, my measures of bias are relative
to the overall media bias. I also provide a reader-maximization model for front page decisions
that I use to interpret the empirical biases of the newspaper as preferences of its population
of target readers. From my estimation, I recover maps of complementarities among pairs of
topics for each of the major US newspapers. I find that complementarities between news
contribute in a large portion to the probability that news on a topic appears in the front page.