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Engaging and informative, Evaluating Media Bias provides an academically informed but broadly accessible overview of the major concepts and controversies involving media bias. Schiffer explores the contours of the partisan-bias controversy before pivoting to real biases: the patterns, constraints, and shortcomings plaguing American political news.

This book theorizes and tests the conditions under which the press is a powerful political institution, and when it cedes its power to other institutions and actors. It gives a theoretical framework and substantive case studies to aid scholars across a wide area of American politics in understanding the news media's role in American politics

To what degree do early presidential primary debates aid party‐loyalist decision making? And does this effect diminish as the debate season progresses? This study utilizes a unique, daily data set and time‐series regression to chart the effect of 13 pre‐primary debates on party‐loyalist enthusiasm in the 2012 Republican nomination contest—as measured by Facebook activity—along with news coverage and Google search volume. Though the debates did lead to new partisan expressions of candidate support, these expressions declined sharply as the pre‐primary debate season dragged on.

Among well-documented factors that shape political news coverage are reliance on official sources, indexing of coverage to the range of opinion among officials, and privileging of "episodes" over "themes." The Downing Street Memo controversy of 2005 embodies a clash among those media agenda-setting factors and the intense desire of Internet activists to bring coverage to an issue that most political and media elites initially ignored. This case study analyzes the brief burst of mainstream coverage of the controversy. While straight news and television coverage was pegged mostly to official words and action, activists apparently had an easier time penetrating the op-ed pages of major newspapers.

News-judgment criteria – the standards journalists use to ascertain the newsworthiness of an event or phenomenon – play a key role in shaping news coverage of politics. For example, why do some Supreme Court decisions receive mainstream media coverage while others do not? The most intuitive predictor of coverage is a case's fit with well-theorized criteria such as timeliness, color, simplicity, and impact. However, previous studies of Court coverage measure a case's fit with journalistic routines and values with blunt and indirect measures. We create a more granular measure utilizing multiple coders to evaluate case summaries for their fit with several news-judgment criteria, thereby illustrating the potential of crowd-sourced assessments of newsworthiness. We find that the new measure is strongly correlated with coverage in the New York Times and six television outlets.

Beginning with Ronald Reagan in 1982, U.S. presidents have typically given a radio address every Saturday morning designed primarily to make news in the Sunday newspapers and on the Sunday news programs. A content analysis of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Houston Chronicle, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from 1982 to 2005 shows that coverage of the presidents' addresses has diminished over time both in terms of the percentage of radio addresses covered and the number of paragraphs directly citing the president. Positive predictors of coverage include presidential approval ratings and a foreign-policy topic. Negative influences on coverage include the number of addresses given by all presidents since Reagan, indicating a decreasing lack of novelty, and whether the speech occurred in an election year.