A Fair Test of Media Bias: Party, Race, and Gender in Coverage of the 1992 House Banking Scandal

Abstract

Popular sentiment, political actors, and even scholarly work suggest the media are biased. Yet, work on media bias targeted against such varied political entities as Republicans, African Americans, and women does not provide a fair baseline with which to compare coverage. That is, previous research lacks a comparison of coverage focused on politicians who have produced the same record, and who therefore should receive equitable coverage. This study uses the House banking scandal of 1992, in which hundreds of members were revealed to have regularly overdrawn their accounts, to compare coverage of members when their behavior was the same. Coverage of Democrats is compared with Republicans, Whites with African Americans, and men with women based on their check writing habits. The findings suggest that there is little difference in the treatment of Democrats and Republicans; however, African Americans and women receive significantly less desirable coverage than do Whites and men. The overall pattern is consistent with the distribution effect, in which people whose traits are rare in an occupational field may suffer from negative associations.