Media

Question 1

Why is media important

Answer 1

• can provide information about the state of the world
• can provide info about ideoligies ans proposals
• can provide infor on implemented gov policy
• info on competency/ honesty of political actors

Question 2

How does media have a positive role

Answer 2

• the media is good at acquiring and transmitting information: high fixed cost and low variable costs
• inefficient for each citizen/ voter to do this directly
• the media fulfil this role

Question 3

How can the media provide misleading information

Answer 3

• media owners have their own agenda ( political/ profit maximising)
• this leads to filtered or selective information
• and this leads to bias f information ( unjust favouritism on what is covered and how its covered

Question 4

Why is social media important

Answer 4

-

Question 5

Why is social media not that good

Answer 5

• social media is algorithm based ( addictive )
• can be seen as an echo chamber

Question 6

Does radio communication affect spending patterns

Answer 6

• logic: those who have a radio should be more informed about politics
  radio acess should lead to more spending ( Stromberg 2004) those who have radios make different depictions to those who do not have one

Question 7

Elise see and stromberg (2007)

Answer 7

• exploit the fact that different days have different amont of news pressure
• as some days have more newsworthy evens than others
• and they compete for a set amount of airtime
  -a storm struck India may 1999 (278 killed with 40,000 affected) and same da there was a school shooting in the US ( competition for airtime ) - no US aid was received
• a year earlier a similar storm struck India ( 250 people killed 40,000 affected) - fewer breaking stories in the US and the victims received us aid

Question 8

New pressure and naturals disasters

Answer 8

• collect data on national disasters and see the USAs response
• they took 63,000 lives and 125 mil were effected
• hey exploit the occurrence of exogenous news events ( Olympic Games, World Series, general news pressure)
• they compete for airtime with coverage disasters
• authors control for severity
  Results: if there is a lot of news pressure then aid spending is reduced

Question 9

Evidence from news pressure and naturals disasters

Answer 9

• strong evidence for crowding out of some events
• has implications
• distaers during the olympics are 5% les Linley to make it onto the news and Therfore 6% less likely to receive funding
• marginally newsworthy events coverage increase relied chance by 70%
  Thought experiment: a disaster during the olympics need to be three time as deadly to receive relief on it

Question 10

How does media impact policy

Answer 10

• more informed voters may be aware of politicians choice
• information is a key channel that media disciplines politicians
• politicians know this: they can the their actions strategically so that things can be covered and forgottenn during a heavy new cycle and they can influence media directly ( media capture)
• those who control the media have incentive to influencée content

Question 11

Do media outlets hold Bias

Answer 11

• people seen in a survey find that certain media outlets are more left wing or right wing and hairy any think the media is neural

Question 12

Gentzkow and Shapiro 2006 ( example of media bias ）

Answer 12

• Fox News and Al Jazeera recount Us militaryattach on Iraq very differently
• they have the same set of facts
• differ in what they omit ( different choice of words)
• differ in credibility to primary source
• convey radically different perspectives
• where does the bias or slant come from
• what are the politics effects
  They create a novel measure of bias / slant and look at what is the main drivers of it

Question 13

What are the two main drivers of media bias

Answer 13

• political ( media owners have stron ideoligies and the bias serves to convince others
• economic ( media owners care about profits ( bias is profit maximising because it served demand ))

Question 14

How do Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) measure the bias / slant

Answer 14

• look at us congressional record
• check whether a democrat or republicans said it and fid out the different partisan phrases
• they then correlate news outlet language with partisan congressional phrases
• if they use more republican etc and if they use more democratic phrases etc
  Better mesure then reader perception

Question 15

How do Gentzkow and Shapiro (2010) drivers find

Answer 15

• the model estimates the supply slant - slant can be driven by outlets customers ( channel profit) (proxy slant demand in postcode)
• owners identity ( ideology channel) ( proxy political donations)
• profit channel explains more variation in slant Therfore owner diversity Ned’s to be preconditioned for media diversity
• bias is endogenous responds to preference of consumers voters

Question 16

DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007)

Answer 16

Fox new effect - ideological shift of 3-28% convinced to vote republican around 200,000 additional votes
- didn’t convince democrats to a switch but they convince immobilised conservatives to vote