[gov3009-l] Quinn on 'Assessing the Political Positions of Media'

Dear Applied Statistics Community, Apologies for the late email this week—we've experienced some last minute scheduling changes. This week Kevin Quinn, Department of Government, will present 'Assessing Political Positions of Media' a project that is joint with Daniel Ho, Stanford Law School. Kevin provided the following abstract: Although central to understanding the role of the media, few quantitative measures of the political positions of media exist. We amass a new, large-scale dataset to shed light on this question. Collecting and classifying over 1500 editorials adopted by 25 major U.S. newspapers on 495 Supreme Court cases from 1994-2004, we apply an item response theoretic approach to place newspapers on a substantively meaningful and long validated scale of political preferences. Our results provide significant insights into the study of the media. We show that 18 of the 25 papers are more likely to the left of the median Justice for this period, but also considerable evidence that this may be an artifact of the liberalness of urban, elite, high circulation papers. Kevin also provided a link to the paper, which is available here: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~kquinn/papers/Ho_Quinn_unblind.pdf<ht… Our workshop will convene this Wednesday at 12 noon with a light lunch, with the presentation to start at 1215. We are located in CGIS-Knafel (1737 Cambridge St) Room N-354. Please Contact me with any questions, comments, or concerns Justin Grimmer