Do Newspapers Matter? Short-Run and Long-Run Evidence From the Closure ofThe Cincinnati Post

Abstract

The Cincinnati Post published its last edition on New Year's Eve 2007, leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer as the only daily newspaper in the market. The next year, fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the Kentucky suburbs most reliant on the Post, incumbents became more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell. These changes happened even though the Enquirer at least temporarily increased its coverage of the Post's former strongholds. Voter turnout remained depressed through 2010, nearly three years after the Post closed, but the other effects diminished with time. We exploit a difference-in-differences strategy and the fact that the Post's closing date was fixed 30 years in advance to rule out some non-causal explanations for our results. Although our findings are statistically imprecise, they demonstrate that newspaperseven underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed -can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life.

Political Consequences of the Endangered Local Watchdog: Newspaper Decline and Mayoral Elections in the United States

“…It follows that when local newspapers fold, citizen engagement suffers. A case study by Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido (2013) examined political effects of the closing of the Cincinnati Post , a small newspaper that served the northern Kentucky suburbs of the region and went out of print in 2007. The study analyzed data from municipalities that made up the core circulation area of the Cincinnati Post .…”

“…Although past research has found important consequences of weak or absent newspapers, none to our knowledge have systematically examined the effects of shrinking newsrooms on local political outcomes over time and across multiple cities. In addition, many of the more recent studies have used the rather blunt measure of newspaper closure (e.g., Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido 2013). Previous work suggests the sharp and sustained decline in newsroom staffing that began in 2006 would have had important consequences for local politics.…”

The Effect of Fact‐Checking on Elites: A Field Experiment on U.S. State Legislators

“…Nonetheless, the variation in media scrutiny that has been observed (e.g., Arnold 2004;Fogarty 2008;Schaffner 2006), including at the state level (Campante and Do 2014;Carpini, Keeter, and Kennamer 1994), seems to be consequential. It has been shown that coverage of legislators at both the state and federal level can have significant consequences for citizen political knowledge (Carpini, Keeter, and Kennamer 1994), the incumbency advantage in elections (Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson 2011;Prior 2006;Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido 2013), legislator behavior in office (Hogan n.d.;Snyder and Strömberg 2010), and state-level corruption (Campante and Do 2014). We argue that the threat of fact-checking has the potential to create career risks for politicians by generating negative coverage that could damage their reputation and credibility and thereby harm their prospects for reelection, entering party leadership, or seeking higher office.…”

Modeling surveys effects in political competitions

“…In this case, then, an active choice would operate in seeking the most appreciated information, as held for example, by [7,49,68]. This debate is not being put forward here: what matters, for our purposes, is the evidence that news media affect electoral participation of citizens, as shown by [67,56,64,41,63,33], among others. For example, as explained in [27], social networks may help in recognizing the political orientation on the basis of the shared contents.…”