Journalist Homicides and News about Municipal Corruption: Evidence from Mexico

• In Event: The Politics of Corruption

Abstract

Every year, thousands of journalists are murdered around the world in their attempt to expose local corruption. The effect that these assassinations have on the news media is unclear. While there are reasons to think that murders might send a chilling effect and propel journalists to censor themselves, there are also reasons to expect them to trigger a rally-round-the-flag effect and attract more attention to the cases under scrutiny. To the extent that censorship can bias the informational environment, the subject is critical for our understanding of a general environment of misinformation.
To investigate the competing hypotheses mentioned before we use data from all journalists murdered in Mexico between 2000-2021. We use regression discontinuity models to estimate the causal effect of the assassination of 72 journalists investigating a case of municipal corruption on the amount of news about the said case. We find no evidence of a censoring effect in the short run. If anything, we find that the assassination of a journalist increases the news about a case of corruption. Our findings bring important evidence to a central discussion on the behavior of the news media in the face of local violence and corruption in developing countries.

Authors

• Maria del Pilar Fuerte, Centro GEO

• Daniel Zizumbo-Colunga, CONAHCYT