Handbook of Media Economics, vol 1B

others, all such selection is evaluative to some extent. In short, there is no such thing as

purely objective reporting of any situation or events” (207, 212).

14.3. BIAS AND WELFARE

Under our definition, bias is only defined as a relative concept: one outlet can be to the

right of another, but only in special cases, is it meaningful to talk about “unbiased” or

“objective” reporting, about “more” or “less” bias, or about whether a given outlet is

left or right of “center.” There is, in general, no inherent link between bias and welfare.

The benchmark for evaluating information content of signals is the

Blackwell (1951)

ordering. A reporting strategy σ is Blackwell more informative than σ

0

if σ

0

can be pro-

duced by combining σ with random noise; in