The Effects of News Media Bias on Election Outcomes: A Comprehensive Study of Interpretive-Framing, Priming and Agenda-Setting

Abstract

News media has the ability to create biases and influence audience perceptions by emphasizing certain elements of a narrative and minimizing others. However, different news biases have different degrees of effectiveness in encourage (or discourage) broader political participation and affecting voters’ political preferences in different geographic regions and electoral periods. This research studies the appearance and the timing of various media bias (using interpretative-framing, priming and agenda-setting techniques) before and after presidential elections in local political news reporting in all 50 states from 1980 to 2021. The empirical results show that the use of liberal-leaning priming technique used in the news increases the probability of electing Democratic presidential candidates while reducing the chance of Republican candidates. On the other hand, the use of conservative-leaning priming and agenda-setting techniques reduces the probability of electing Democratic candidates. In terms of voter participation, left-leaning interpretive-framing reduces the voting rate of Republican voters and left-leaning priming increases the rate of Democrat voters. Finally, the appearance of conservative-leaning agenda-setting technique is associated with a lower voter participation in the Democratic Party.