Clarity of News Coverage and Electoral Competition

• In Event: Censorship and Persuasion

Abstract

Many journalism scholars and commentators demand government support for the press. This is because media as watchdogs is considered as a kind of public good that is essential for the well-functioning of democracies. In 2018, the Canadian government was planning a $600 million five-year program aiming at helping those financially-challenged news organizations to adapt to a digital age. Upon this proposal was unveiled, somewhat not surprisingly, commentators pointed out the potential threat of this government aid on independence of journalism. In the literature of media capture, previous works have discussed about governments using financial incentives to exchange for favor from the media and quid-pro-quo access granting. It seems that if the government subsidizes all the media outlets fairly and does not censor news, the media will produce ideal news reports that maximize social welfare. In this paper, we propose a formal model to study how a government can control the capacity of political-motivated media outlets and by such affect news coverage of its performance and increase the likelihood of winning a reelection. The key innovations of the model are: 1) the voters care both the qualities of candidates and the variance of their qualities and 2) the clarity of the media coverage is jointly determined by the media outlets. By analyzing this model, we show that the media can bias the information environment even with no framing, no priming, no gate-keeping in terms of strategic selection of coverage. Moreover, we show that controlling the coffers of the media is an effective way of information manipulation. By such, incumbent governments can gain advantage in reelection through information environment without involving fake news or misinformation. More importantly, if the qualities of media outlets hinge on government subsidy, our model shows that even fair distribution of subsidy may not sufficient to enable the media outlets that are critical against the incumbent to fully function. It can turn out that the pro-incumbent media outlets are relatively more engaging in news coverage. Interestingly, even when the incumbent is known to be bad, it is still possible that the pro-incumbent outlet wants to report clearly but the anti-incumbent one does not. This is because a known devil is sometimes better than an unknown angel. A resource-poor anti-government media outlet will not exert efforts in reporting accurately when it is not able to make the incumbent bad enough, but can just demystify the uncertainty of the incumbent's competence. Thus, it is not entirely surprising that we sometimes see that pro-incumbent media outlets can be critical against the government to some extent and anti-incumbent media outlets ironically exerting no effort in reporting. That is, pro-incumbent media outlets can sometimes be “active” watchdogs, but uncovering scandals also does not necessarily harm the incumbent’s prospect of reelection. Overall, this paper aims to establish that the degree of distortion of information environment can be underestimated if we measure that only by observing unfair transfer from the government to selected media outlets and fabricated or censored news reporting.

Authors

• Greg Chih-Hsin Sheen, National Cheng Kung University

• Myunghoon Kang, Bilkent University