Something of a blow to one of Polly's pet peeves

We're all aware of one of Polly Toynbee's little foibles: her insistence that because the people who own successful newspapers aren't left wing therefore the true left wing nature of our society gets overlooked and overruled.

Never forget what Labour is up against: 80% of newspaper readership for a hundred years has belonged not just to conservatives, but mainly to extreme maverick press barons, using their power to control politics.

We would have a far more left wing government and polity if only those capitalists hadn't been able to brainwash the people.

Interestingly, the John Bates Clark Medal as just been awarded by the American Economy Association. For research into exactly this idea:

A first set of Gentzkow’s papers studies political bias in the news media. In “What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from U.S. Daily Newspapers” (Econometrica, 2010), Gentzkow and co-author Jesse Shapiro use textual analysis of a large set of newspaper articles to classify content as more Republican or more Democrat (“media slant”). This is done using statistical analysis of phrases that differentially show up in Republican versus Democrat Senators’ speeches in the Senate. These constructed measures of media slant match well with conventional wisdom and with other, more ad-hoc and subjective newspaper political classification. Gentzkow and Shapiro then use these measures to estimate demand for newspapers, and to model the newspaper owner’s choice of media slant. They find that most of a newspaper’s media slant can be explained by the preferences of its readers rather than by the tastes of its owner. The second part of the paper tries to sort out whether the bias of individual papers is driven by “demand” – i.e. the political biases of their target audience – or “supply”, i.e. the idiosyncratic preferences of the owners. They find that it is mostly demand.

It's the other way around. Newspapers, editors, proprietors, do not determine the views of the readership, rather they try to divine what those views are and then pander to them. Meaning that if 80% of the UK newspapers are to the right of Polly Toynbee then 80% of the population is to the right of Polly Toynbee. And thus, obviously, in a democracy we should never go anywhere near the sort of policies that Toynbee favours.

Of course, we already know that last but it's nice to get another confirmation.