Independence and Quality of Mass Media in the Internet Age (MIRAGE) (2017)

Equipe de recherche : 

Ruben DURANTE (Sciences Po, Department of Economics)

Valentino LARCINESE (LSE, Political Science)

Ruben ENIKOLOPOV (UPF/IPEG, Economics/Political Science)

Quoc-Anh DO (Sciences Po, Department of Economics)

This project obtained funding from LIEPP through the 2017 call for proposals.

Descriptif du projet : 

The project examines how the Internet has transformed the way news are produced and disseminated, namely through its influence on traditional media, and its ultimate effect on media independence and content quality. To this end, we tackle three distinct but intertwined questions. First, we study how lower advertising revenues affect newspapers’ organization and content quality by exploiting the staggered introduction of advertising platform Craigslist across the US. Second, we examine how media dependence on advertisers influences news bias by testing the relationship between advertising spending by car manufacturers and coverage of car safety recalls in US newspapers. Finally, we study how the dependence of media on banks affects coverage of financial issues; focusing on Europe’s sovereign debt crisis, we test whether newspapers linked to banks with higher exposure to risky debt endorsed different crisis-management measures. The results will shed light on the deep transformations the media industry is undergoing and their implications for the quality of democracy.

Poster of the project - June 2020

Publications :

Advertising Spending And Media Bias: Evidence From News Coverage Of Car Safety Recalls (with G. Beattie, B. Knight, A. Sen), NBER WP#23940 and CEPR Discussion Paper #12366. The paper has recently been accepted for publication in Management Science.