Partisan and Structural Balance in Newspaper Coverage of U.S. Senate Races in 2004 with Female Nominees

Abstract

Nine newspapers covering U.S. Senate races in 2004 were mostly even- handed in the space and prominence given candidates. Reporter gender, newsroom diversity, and newspaper size were associated with partisan imbalance giving more favorable treatment to Democrats. The partisanship of a story's lead predicted the story's structural imbalance, regardless of the party the imbalance favored. However, story partisan and structural imbalances were negligibly related, suggesting that news processing conventions rather than journalistic partisanship produced the imbalance.