If you ever doubted the impact of economic motivations on press behavior, the spectacle of ABC’s Mark Halperin groveling for conservative support before the election should have cured you. Here’s what Halperin said on “The O’Reilly Factor”: “[A]s an economic model, if you want to thrive like Fox News Channel, you want to have a future, you better make sure conservatives find your product appealing.”

Interestingly, Halperin’s groveling has implications for the debate among academics over media bias. A simple spatial model of media competition for consumers with ideological preferences suggests that outlets should seek to differentiate themselves by catering to the preferences (or biases) of a particular segment of the public. Two recent economic models explore the issue in more detail.
Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer of Harvard argue that news outlets should divide the market and cater to the biases of one side or the other when consumers are heterogeneous, whereas Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago have suggest greater competition should decrease bias and increase accuracy motivations (contingent on the extent to which reporting on a subject is verifiable).

If the spatial model or the Mullainathan and Shleifer model were correct, we would expect the networks to differentiate politically given the vast amount of competition that they face from other outlets. Instead, however, the network news divisions have been going to great lengths to appease conservatives and maintain an ideologically diverse audience. Besides ABC’s Halperin, NBC’s Brian Williams and Tim Russert have been sucking up to Rush Limbaugh, and CBS featured Limbaugh in one of the first “Free Speech” segments on its revamped Katie Couric newscast. It’s possible that the networks are a special case for various reasons (including the political interests of their parent corporations and the risk of damaging the network audiences for non-news programming), but they certainly don’t fit well. On the other hand, Fox News, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and others are clearly seeking to appeal to particular segments of the ideological spectrum. I don’t know who’s right, or if we need some sort of hybrid model…