A Theory of News Coverage and Elections

• In Event: Models of Political Institutions

Abstract

The mass media are the primary source of political information that voters use to evaluate political candidates and to make voting decisions. The kinds and quality of information that media provide will therefore have important consequences for the nature and outcomes of political competition. In recent years, academics and practitioners alike have expressed concerns about a shrinking capacity of news outlets to produce informative news coverage. Some link this to an increasing focus on so-called `soft news’ – news stories about scandalous events that attract the attention of potential news consumers but have limited political relevance. In this paper, I develop a model that combines a theory of elections with a model of news production to better understand the relationship between the incentives of profit-maximizing news outlets to invest in informative news coverage and the extent to which news stories attract the attention of readers. Two features distinguish my set up from existing political economy models of the media and elections. First, news stories are characterized not only by their informational content but also by their visibility; stories that are highly visible are more likely to spark the attention of voters. Second, voters decide between buying a subscription to a newspaper and single copy purchases. The relative attractiveness of these two modes of news consumption to voters is affected by both how informative and how attention-grabbing news stories are. A profit-maximizing news outlet invests in the informational content of its news stories. The model links the extent of scandal in a news environment to the informativeness of news coverage. It also yields predictions about how the degree to which the visibility and the informativeness of news stories are substitutes or complements affects the incentives of news outlets to invest in informative coverage.

Author

• Anna Maria Wilke, Columbia University