Institutional Racism

Along the same lines, David Baron of Stanford GSB presents a game-theoretic model of
mass media behaviour in which, given that the pool of journalists systematically leans
towards the left or the right, mass media outlets maximize their profits by providing
content that is biased in the same direction. They can do so, because it is cheaper to
hire journalists who write stories that are consistent with their political position. A
concurrent theory would be that supply and demand would cause media to attain a
neutral balance because consumers would of course gravitate towards the media they
agreed with. This argument fails in considering the imbalance in self-reported political
allegiances by journalists themselves, that distort any market analogy as regards offer:
(..) Indeed, in 1982, 85 percent of Columbia Graduate School of Journalism students
identified themselves as liberal, versus 11 percent conservative" (Lichter, Rothman, and
Lichter 1986: 48), quoted in Sutter, 2001.
This same argument would have news outlets in equal numbers increasing profits of a
more balanced media far more than the slight increase in costs to hire unbiased
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