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Everybody’s getting into the media bias game nowadays. Including high-falutin economists, it seems, from MIT and the London School of Economics.

Take a look at the abstract of an extremely ambitious study about how “U.S. newspapers” cover the issue of unemployment under Republican presidents as opposed to their Democratic counterparts:

We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit. We investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president's political affiliation. We find evidence that newspapers with pro-Democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern. This result is not driven by the partisanship of readers. There is on the contrary no evidence of a partisan bias -- or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement policy -- for stories on inflation, budget deficit or trade deficit.

Ooooooh! Smoking gun! We’ve finally dusted for prints and found left-handed bias. If it were that simple. But it’s never that cut-and-dry.

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It's Friday -- which is the day after Thursday -- and that means it's time for us to continue the Public Eye Chat we began yesterday (discussing Vatican media protocol, among other things) with CBS News London Correspondent Richard Roth.

Matthew Felling: As for the events of the last week, were there any surprises or difficulties that popped up in covering the bombing attempts?

Richard Roth: There’s always difficulty here in the lack of information released once the criminal process is underway. For example, when the police tell you that someone’s arrested – I’m on one of the alert systems that the Metropolitan Police have – here’s the kind of detail you get: “We’ve arrested A, B and C” is what the e-mail says. They may have ages, towns where the arrests took place. But there’ll be nothing more than that. Slowly, some of the information may filter out, but on an official level, they’re so careful and so concerned about pre-trial publicity that could influence the criminal justice process that there’s very little specific information that comes out. That’s what you see unfolding in this story. There’s going to be a lot [of media coverage] about this that I’ll bet will either be wrong in substance or wrong in small details by the time this procedure is over. That’s always a frustration.

I was only on this story on Friday, when it was very quickly developing in terms of what had actually happened. But it was essentially the same frustrations all journalists feel who want to get facts and get enough of them right in a story that’s breaking fast.

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Following last week's bombings in Mumbai, (formerly known as Bombay) chronicles of the event have inevitably drummed up references to two past events that bear similarities, the bombings in Madrid in March 2004 and the London bombings in July 2005. Bob Schieffer introduced the "Evening News'" first story on Mumbai on the day it occurred, July 11: “Two years ago, terrorists struck rail lines in Madrid, Spain. Just a year ago, it was the subways of London. Today, the target was a commuter rail line in Mumbai, India.” But why is media coverage of the events in Mumbai not on par with the level of attention that the Madrid and London bombings received?

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