When ideology meets bottom line: analysis on market competition and ideological bias in newspapers

ABSTRACT

This study investigated how newspapers adopted partisan branding as a product differentiation strategy under pressure of intense market competition, through cases of conservative dailies in South Korea. Despite academic interest in news media's partisanship, only a few studies attempted to conduct analysis at the organizational level. Drawing on the hierarchy of influences model as a main theoretical framework, the present study examined how partisanship of newspapers was related to the social and economic forces. Evidence demonstrated that conservative bias increased as market competition intensified. Conservative bias was positively associated with the ideological mood of the conservative group, and the revenue decreased as conservative newspapers carried stronger conservative bias. These results will add insight into the prevalence of partisanship in today's media environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Media bias
• market competition
• hierarchy of influences model

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Seok Ho Lee is a doctoral candidate in the School of Journalism, University of Texas at Austin.

Notes

1. Previous studies had mixed results to determine ideological disposition of daily newspapers in South Korea. Ideological disposition of those newspapers varies depending on issues (Han & Seol, 2006). The variation of ideological disposition was also found whether newspapers were categorized in binary (conservative and liberal), or three nominal (conservative, moderate, and liberal). The present study adopted the binary criteria to choose conservative newspapers considering political polarization between conservatives and liberals among the public. Thus, this study excluded two newspapers, which have consistently displayed liberal disposition in many studies, from subjects of the analysis. Joongang ilbo was excluded as well due to the limited availability of Boolean operator in its search engine, and search function by news content in the news archive services.