Median Voter Theory

Trying to make sense of it all
But I can see it makes no sense at all
Is it cool to go to sleep on the floor?
I don't think that I can take anymore
--Stealers Wheel

Median voter theory (Black, 1958) says that that when you take a group of voters and line them in rank order from farthest Left to farthest Right, then the voter in the middle, i.e., the median, gets his/her way in terms of policy.

Consequently, if you're a politically motivated journalist, then your target audience is median voters, or moderates.

Combine this theory with the findings from Crawford and Sobel's (1982) model. The farther away a politically motivated journalist is from a centrist ideology, then it is more likely it is that the journalist will exaggerate the truth and report inaccurately. This is because the journalist is trying to win over moderate receivers, who by definition differ in political ideology from senders positioned farther toward the edges of the political spectrum.

Given that survey research finds that an overwhelming majority of journalists lean Left (e.g., Lichter, Rothman, & Lichter, L.S. 1986; Povich, 1996), hopefully you can see where this takes us theoretically w.r.t. predicting the general direction of bias in the media.

References

Black, D. 1958. The theory of committees and elections. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lichter, S.R., Rothman, S., & Lichter, L.S. 1986. The media elite. Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler.

Povich, E. 1996. Partners and adversaries: The contentious connection between Congress and the media. Arlington, VA: Freedom Forum.