User:Chloe Hongyi Wu/Media bias

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Supply-driven bias and demand-driven bias

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Supply-driven bias

A potential bias driver which represent that companies may "prefer consumers to take particular actions".

Implications of Supply-driven bias in the case of firm incentives:


 * Supply-side incentives are able to control and affect consumers. Strong persuasive incentives can even be more powerful than profit motivation.
 * Competition leads to decreased bias and hinders the impact of persuasive incentives. And it tends to make the results more responsive to consumer demand.
 * Competition can improve consumer treatment, but it may affect the total surplus due to the ideological payoff of the owners.

''An example of supply-driven bias is Zinman and Zitzewitz's study of snowfall reporting. Ski attractions tend to be biased in snowfall reporting, and they have higher snowfall than official forecasts report.''

Demand-driven bias

A potential bias driver that is "demand from consumers themselves". Consumers tend to favor a biased media based on their preferences, which is also known as “confirmation news”.

There are three major factors that make this choice for consumers:


 * Delegation, which takes a filtering approach to bias.
 * Psychological utility, "consumers get direct utility from news whose bias matches their own prior beliefs."
 * Reputation, consumers will make choices based on their prior beliefs and the reputation of the media companies.

Demand-side incentives are often not related to distortion. Competition can still affect the welfare and treatment of consumers, but it is not very effective in changing bias compared to the supply side.

In demand-driven bias, preferences and attitudes of readers can be monitored on social media, and mass media write news that caters to readers based on them. Mass media skew news driven by viewership and profits, leading to the media bias. And readers are also easily attracted to lurid news, although they may be biased and not true enough.

Dong, Ren, and Nickerson investigated Chinese stock-related news and weibos in 2013-2014 from Sina Weibo and Sina Finance (4.27 million pieces of news and 43.17 million weibos) and found that news that aligns with Weibo users' beliefs are more likely to attract readers. Also, the information in biased reports also influences the decision-making of the readers.

''In Raymond and Taylor's test of weather forecast bias, they investigated weather reports of the New York Times during the games of the baseball team the Giants from 1890 to 1899. Their findings suggest that the New York Times produce biased weather forecast results depending on the region in which the Giants play. When they played at home in Manhattan, reports of sunny days predicting increased. From this study, Raymond and Taylor found that bias pattern in New York Times weather forecasts was consistent with demand-driven bias.''