Tyler Cowen points to a paper by Jeremy Burke, which indicates that it does not make economic sense for any newspaper to be seen partisan:
A majority of Americans view news organizations as politically biased, creating a strong incentive for firms to try to present themselves as impartial. This paper argues that the desire to appear unbiased leads to information loss.
As Tyler Cowen notes in his commentary,
Paul Krugman often makes this complaint, namely that newspapers often prefer a “He said, he said” story over simply telling the truth. One message of this paper is that the problem isn’t so easy to stop. Newspapers aren’t just being lax, rather they are maximizing their profits and reputation.
Apparently, the paper also discusses blogs.
There are a couple of key points, I think: one is that it is the desire to appear unbiased, not to be unbiased actually. The other is that this argument might hold only when majority of people do hold the view that news organisations are politically biased. I do not know if it is true of India. Of course, in Tamilnadu, for example, some Tamil dailies were openly partisan. But, we did know of some which weren’t; I think Dinamani was one of the non-partisan ones; I do not know if it still is. In the English dailies, as I noted earlier, Hindu was considered non-partisan; it no longer is, and I doubt if it ever was.
By the way, the piece also reminded me of something I read (I forget where) about Pravda (“The truth”) and Izvestia (“The news”) during the Soviet regime:
There is no Pravda in Izvestia; there is no Izvestia in Pravda.
Any case, take a look at Cowen’s post and the comments; some of the commentors disagree with the very premise that being seen non-partisan is bad for business.
