Mass Media

Mass Media

diverse, decentralized, and pretty good

Newspapers: old and slow, most editorial checks

Broadcasters: newer and faster, fewer editorial checks

Social Media: newest and fastest, almost no editorial checks, repackaging other news

What does Mass Media do

relieves information asymmetries on both sides

voters get to know what politicians are doing and politicians get to know what their voters want

desired outcome: better policy, more accurate rewards and sanctions

Media Bias

systemic inaccuracies in representations of what happened

not mistakes or random chance

Selection Bias

bias from what journalists devote their attention to

Israel-Palestine vs Trump presidenct

Framing and Priming Bias

bias from how journalists cover what we decided was news

the pictures and words used to convey the news

Promotion Bias

bias from what news the platforms decide to promote

difficult question to answer systematically because of proprietary data

Echo Chambers

the idea that people only get news with their political beliefs

empirically, this has not been proven and often is proven false

only extreme left and extreme right are in echo chambers

Consumer Choice Bias

bias due to sensationalizing things to get the news platform money

Explaining Bias

Competition: introduction of new news station in a place increases competition and ideological diversity. Newspapers need to differentiate their product

Nationalization: national news coverage seeping into local news and centralizing news. Media is owned by a few and this leads to inc in national news and less ideological diversity

Does Bias Matter

basic media incentives, like reporting novel headline-grabbing statistics, can have measurable impacts on voter choices