Corruption Via Media Capture: The Effect of Competition

Abstract

In this article, we compare a governments optimal choice of whether to engage in corruption by capturing the media outlets through bribery in two alternative media market structures: monopoly versus duopoly. While there is an extra bribe claimant in a media duopoly relative to monopoly, it may also be harder for each firm to individually expose corruption when the rival co-opts with the government. We find that when the latter effect is stronger than the former, media is captured at lower bribes under duopoly relative to monopoly and in such instances media competition facilitates rather than hindering corruption.

Encuadres y uso de fuentes en la vigilancia mediática. Análisis de prensa argentina y chilena: casos José López y Caval

“…La falta de competencia de los sistemas de medios de esta región en cuanto a los espacios de información periodística, cuestiona un ambiente propicio para la accountability mediatica, la que se postula como limitada dado que puede depender tanto de la propia agenda política de los medios dominantes del sistema como de la influencia de poder de terceros actores como empresarios, políticos, anunciates privados y estatales. Se supone que mientras mayor es la pluralidad mediatica más se asegura una mayor cantidad de fuentes para la verdad (Prat, 2013;Vaidya, 2016).…”

The price of silence: Media competition, capture, and electoral accountability

“…Models of supply driven media bias (but without an explicit model of media capture) are for exampleBaron (2006),Anderson and McLaren (2012),Duggan and Martinelli (2011) and,Hafer et al (2017),Levy et al (2017).12 A different but related type of supply-driven bias is the one induced by advertisers, documented byReuter and Zitzewitz (2006) andGambaro and Puglisi (2015). In that setting,Beattie et al (2017) find that newspapers tend to provide less coverage of car recalls when they involve their advertisers, and that this effect is mitigated by competition in the number of outlets (again, because of the assumption) but exacerbated by competition for advertisement.13 Other relevant models of media capture that do not focus on competition arePetrova (2008) andCorneo (2006), where the capturing entities are interest groups or particular factions of society;Kibris and Kocak (2020) look at how the presence of social media can make capture more or less effective, showing that social media can make partial capture ineffective, hence pushing some countries toward complete freedom and other toward complete capture.14 A relevant exception isVaidya and Gupta (2016). They study the effect of media competition on corruption via media capture, finding a mixed result: when the probability that bad news about the incumbent can be discredited is sufficiently high, then it may be cheaper to capture a duopoly than a monopoly, while the opposite is true when the probability is low.…”