The New York Times reports today on a new study from the University of Chicago on the political bias of newspapers. The study found that newspapers are indeed politically biased, but that the slant reflects the feelings of the paper’s subscriber base. Here’s the key quote from the Times’ piece:

The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Dr. Shapiro put it in an interview, “The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers’ demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales.”

Give the people what they want I guess.

[Via Buzz Machine]