@techreport{Alsem2004impact,
abstract = {It is sometimes argued that news reports in the media suffer from biased reporting.
Mullainathan and Shleifer (2002) argue that there are two types of media bias. One bias,
called ideology, reflects a news outlet?s desire to affect reader opinions in a particular
direction. The second bias, referred to as spin, reflects the outlet?s attempt to simply create a
memorable story. Competition between outlets can eliminate the effect of ideological bias, but
increases the incentive to spin stories. We examine whether we find some evidence of spin in
Dutch newspaper reporting on the state of the economy. If newspapers are indeed able to
create memorable stories this should, according to our hypothesis, affect the opinion of
readers with respect to the state of the economy. Sentiments about the actual state of the
economy could be magnified by spin. As a result, consumer confidence \textendash{} a variable that
routinely measures the opinion on the state of the economy \textendash{} can be expected to be affected
not only by economic fundamentals, but also by the way these fundamentals are reported. We
construct a variable that reflects the way consumers perceive economic news reported in
newspapers. We find that this variable indeed has a significant impact on consumer
confidence, which is short-lived.},
author = {Karel-Jan Alsem and Steven Brakman and Lex Hoogduin and Gerard Kuper},
copyright = {http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/Nutzungsbedingungen},
keywords = {E30; E21; E20; 330; Konsumklima; Konsumentenverhalten; Informationsverhalten; Wirtschaftsinformation; Sch\"{a}tzung; Niederlande; Wrtschaftsjournalismus},
language = {eng},
number = {1328},
title = {The impact of newspapers on consumer confidence : does spin bias exist?},
type = {CESifo working papers},
url = {http://hdl.handle.net/10419/18693},
year = {2004}
}
