Effects of ownership and circulation on editorial presentation in West Virginia newspapers

This thesis, which focuses on the post-yellow journalism era in West Virginia, further develops the body of research done on the influence of chain ownership in newspapers.;Historically, strong political biases in news coverage were found in the yellow journalism, early 20th century period. And this study finds a conservative bias on the opinion-editorial pages in a traditionally Democratic state with few competing media markets and reliance upon newspapers for local news. This thesis finds ownership status and circulation size affects the balance and variety of feature items presented within the opinion editorial content. Thus, previous research suggesting chain ownership influence of presentation is affirmed. Layout and editorial bias however, is not clear from this limited study