The Influence of Economic Factors on Media Content Bias Theories: Analysis of Media Coverage of Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address

This paper presents a method to make measurable how media coverage releases information. We consider two causes of bias regarding how the different newspapers manage and present government issues from Barack Obama’s presidential inaugural address. In our empirical analysis, we find that there is a bias according to the political party that dominates in each state. Also, a second bias arises from some previous economic and social features among the different States. In this sense, media moves according to some selected characteristic of the States. The release of information is influenced, among others, by variables like Afro-American citizenship, unemployment or poverty. But, testing ideology and economic and social bias at the same time, we can conclude that only economic reasons really finally matter.