Access Journalism vs Partisan Bias

There's a very interesting dynamic developing in the American political media landscape. Don't worry, this post isn't explicitly political.

One of the huge incentive problems in media is needing access to important people in order to cover them. Objective, or otherwise critical, journalists may be denied access, while favorably biased journalists are granted it. This is known as "access journalism". Despite being a very well-known problem, it remains an intractable issue for the industry.

The Kamala Harris campaign has been blatantly denying access to even friendly outlets, which violates the basic logic of access journalism. The expectation then is that she'll get more objective or critical coverage, and I think we've been seeing that.

Part of why this is so interesting to me is that the American corporate press has a dramatic bias towards Democrats and against Trump (even more so than a generic Republican). Bias and incentives are clashing.

I often say that outcomes follow incentives. If so, then we should expect to see even more critical coverage of Kamala, unless she begins granting more press access.

originally posted at https://stacker.news/items/662537