This dissertation investigates the interaction between politics and the media with a focus on aspects of competition. The first chapter examines the effect of electoral competition on media bias. The empirical findings suggest that there is more media bias when the election is more competitive, which supports the idea that media bias is motivated by an incentive to impact electoral outcomes. The second chapter investigates the effect of competition on the political ideologies of media outlets by looking at a reader's choice of newspaper. The empirical results show that in markets with only one newspaper, residents who are ideological outliers within a market may choose not to read a newspaper. However, in competitive markets, residents who are ideological outliers within a market are more likely to read a newspaper, relative to the monopoly case. The results also show that newspaper competition reduces the incentive among those with extreme ideologies to access political information online. These results suggest that readers prefer a newspaper with an ideology that is closer to their own and that newspaper competition will make newspapers specialize in different ideologies. The third chapter investigates the influence of newspaper endorsements on voting patterns in the 2000 and 2004 U.S. Presidential Elections. The primary finding is that endorsements are influential in the sense that voters are more likely to support the recommended candidate after publication of the endorsement. The degree of this influence, however, depends upon the credibility of the endorsement. In this way, endorsements for the Democratic candidate from left-leaning newspapers are less influential than are endorsements from neutral or right-leaning or newspapers and likewise for endorsements for the Republican. These findings suggest that voters do rely on the media for information during campaigns but that media bias reduces the quality of this information and thus ultimately may lead to mistakes by voters in choosing candidates.
Chiang, Chun-Fang,
"Politics, Competition, and the Media"
(2008).
Economics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z089144G
