Fact-Checking, Media Competition and Political Accountability

• In Event: Coordination and Information

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a simple theoretical framework to investigate how competition shapes the fact-checking behavior of media outlets and evaluates its consequences on the quality of the media's information. The main trade-off we address is one between speed and accuracy. Since fact-checking takes time, media outlets that decide to fact check run the risk of being preempted: if one of their competitors decides to report immediately, they end up losing the scoop. The changes in the media landscape that occurred in recent years, mostly due to the growing importance of the internet and the emergence of the so-called 24-hour news cycle, might have exacerbated this already quintessential problem of journalism1. What is more, there are reasons to believe that the rise of the internet has made the issue of media competition particularly salient: the internet has dramatically decreased the entry barriers into the news media sector, and it has "leveled the playing field," making competition between traditional outlets and a vast fringe of smaller players much more symmetric than before.

In light of this, this paper's first contribution is to show that media competition can lead to worse publishing standards. The stronger media competition, the stronger the pressure for media outlets to choose speed over accuracy, leading to increasingly imprecise news. Interestingly, this result's driving force is the increased amount of accurate information that competition makes available. Consider a media outlet contemplating whether to fact-check a rumor or report it immediately: the larger the number of firms in the market, the greater the probability that at least one has reliable enough information leading it to report immediately. As a result, the outlet has the incentive to immediately report to avoid the risk of losing the scoop.

Having studied how competition affects reporting standards, this paper's second contribution is to study the overall effect of competition on the quality of the information available to citizens. On the one hand, media competition increases the degree of monitoring to which politicians are subject and thus citizens' chances to be informed of political misbehavior. This is the celebrated watchdog role of media and is unambiguously beneficial to society. On the other hand, as we have seen, competition can also crowd out fact-checking and spark scandals that end up damaging honest politicians. The combination of these two effects is a non-monotonic relationship between media competition and political accountability.

Our results concerning the behavior of media in a competitive market tell a cautionary tale with regards to the widespread perception that competition and pluralism are beneficial for political accountability: whereas for a given media accuracy, an increase in media competition is socially beneficial, since it increases the probability of exposing political misbehavior, such positive effects can be more than offset by the worsening of re-porting standards. In particular, our model delivers the realistic prediction that a highly competitive media sector tends towards being scandal-prone, a tendency for which there is evidence in the works of media scholars such as Thompson (2013), who writes: "The pressure to run a story before one's competitors acts as an incentive to disclose information that could spark off a scandal, or which could fuel a scandal which is already underway" .With respect to this, one of the critical findings of our model is that by re-porting unverified scandals, a competitive media inefficiently damages honest politicians. What is more, the deterioration of editorial standards can be so severe as to lead to a "breakdown of accountability," in which the media's informativeness is so low that politicians are not punished following the publication of a scandal.

Finally, our extensions to the baseline model highlight two conditions that can restore a beneficial effect of competition on media accuracy. The first condition is the ability of readers to distinguish facts from rumors. The second one is the presence of rewards for debunking the fake rumors reported by competitors. The common trait, which constitutes another essential takeaway of our work, is that competition increases the attention and sophistication requirements necessary for readers to be able to make the right decisions.

Author

• Antoni-Italo de Moragas, CUNEF