Advertiser bias in business news: A framing perspective

Despite the prevalent view that advertising in news outlets potentially impacts news content about advertisers, empirical evidence of this effect is theoretically and empirically ambiguous. We therefore investigate the relationship between advertising revenues of newspapers and the favorability of the news coverage of their advertisers. To measure advertiser bias, we extend pre-existing generic news frames to the genre of business news, supplement them with valenced sub-frames, and use them to code the favorability of business news articles from the UK. We combine this coding data with data on corporate newspaper advertising to study the relationship between the favorability of news frames and the importance of an advertiser to a newspaper. We find that one tabloid is more likely to use favorable frames for more important advertisers, while no significant relationship was found across UK daily newspapers. These findings relativize previous assumptions about advertiser bias and caution against making unfounded assumptions about newspaper-advertiser relationships that could erode trust in mainstream media even further.