Do Newspapers Matter? Short-run and Long-run Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post

Schulhofer‐Wohl, Sam; Garrido, Miguel Carrera

doi:10.3386/w14817

Cited by 46 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…From a comparative perspective, our results are also relevant for the debate on competition and localism in the US. 48 Indeed, the present analysis provides supporting evidence to the claim that promoting localism and competition in the market for news may have positive effects on electoral participation and on the performance of local governments.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 51%

Meet the Press: How Voters and Politicians Respond to Newspaper Entry and Exit

Drago

Nannicini

Sobbrio

2014

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu This paper evaluates the effects of changes in the supply of news provided by newspapers on electoral participation, political selection, and government efficiency. We address these issues in the Italian context by constructing a new dataset covering the presence of local news by different types of newspapers (i.e., local and national) for all cities above 15,000 inhabitants in the period 1993-2010. The identification strategy exploits discrete changes in the number of newspapers supplying local news and the precise timing of these events. The results show that the entry of newspapers in the market for local news leads to an increase in turnout in municipal elections, a higher probability of the incumbent mayor being reelected, and an improvement in the efficiency of the municipal government (as measured by the speed of revenue collection). The effect of newspapers on government efficiency is larger when mayors are not term-limited and thus face reelection incentives. Our evidence shows that newspapers do not have a major impact on the selection of politicians, but they play a relevant role in keeping politicians accountable once they are in office. Competition plays a relevant role, as the effects are not limited to the first newspaper entering the market. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SJEL Classification: L82, D72, H70

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 51%

Meet the Press: How Voters and Politicians Respond to Newspaper Entry and Exit

Drago

Nannicini

Sobbrio

2014

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

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“…A recent study of Cincinnati and its suburbs (Schulhofer-Wohl & Garrido, 2011) that evaluated the effects of the 2007 closure of the Cincinnati Post also used this kind of community-level approach. The authors suggested that a number of negative political outcomes could be observed from 2007-2010 in the northern Kentucky communities that the Post traditionally served.…”

Section: Empirical Evidence Of Local Newspapers' Importancementioning

confidence: 99%

Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement

Shaker

2014

Political Communication

127

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LEE SHAKERUsing data from the 2009 Current Population Survey (CPS) For generations, scholars (de Tocqueville, 2001;Janowitz, 1968;Kaniss, 1997;Tarde, 1903) have asserted that newspapers provide critical information to citizens and serve as vital watchdogs of public officials. Today, as newspapers struggle through a rocky transition from an analog past toward a digital future, the question of newspapers' importance is especially pressing. In Paul Starr's (2011) words, "More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt." So, as newspaper circulation dwindles and the very future of the print product is questioned, there is scholarly and public attention upon their plight. But how important are newspapers to their communities, and how concerned should we be as they decline?Using data from the 2008 and 2009 November supplements of the Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the United States Census Bureau, this article examines the civic engagement of citizens in the largest American metropolitan areas. The analysis compares the year-over-year change in the civic engagement of citizens in cities that lost a newspaper in the intervening year-namely, Denver and Seattle-and cities that did not lose a newspaper over the same time period. The contrast over time and across cities provides unique Lee Shaker leverage to address the questions raised above, and the CPS data indicate that civic engagement in both Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009. This decline is not consistently replicated in the other cities examined, even after controlling for several other alternative explanations. Though the causality of the decline in civic engagement cannot be definitively established with the CPS data, the findings of this article lend additional empirical support to what many already believed: Newspapers are vital institutions in our democracy, and their decline warrants our concern.

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“…One potential threat that elected officials may be concerned about is critical media coverage. Studies have found that coverage levels of politicians vary widely (Arnold 2004;Campante and Do 2013) and that those differences in coverage can have significant consequences for the incumbency advantage in elections (Prior 2006;Schulhofer-Wohl and Garrido 2009;Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson 2011), legislator performance in office (Snyder and Strömberg 2010), and possibly even state-level patterns of corruption (Campante and Do 2013). Fact-checking thus has the potential to create career risks for politicians by generating negative coverage for politicians that could damage their reputation and credibility.…”

Section: The Effect Of Fact-checking On Politiciansmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Nyhan

Reifler

2014

American J Political Sci

177

118

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Does external monitoring improve democratic performance? Fact-checking has come to play an increasingly important role in political coverage in the United States, but research suggests it may be ineffective at reducing public misperceptions about controversial issues. However, fact-checking might instead help improve political discourse by increasing the reputational costs or risks of spreading misinformation for political elites. To evaluate this deterrent hypothesis, we conducted a field experiment in nine U.S. states in which a randomly assigned group of state legislators were sent a series of letters about the risks to their reputation and electoral security if they are caught making questionable statements. The legislators who were sent these letters were substantially less likely to receive a negative fact-checking rating or to have their accuracy questioned publicly, suggesting that the threat posed by fact-checking can reduce inaccuracy in statements made by political elites.Funding support was provided by the Democracy Fund and New America Foundation. We thank Kevin Esterling, Tom Glaisyer, Michael Herron, Donald P. Green, and audiences at Duke University and Dartmouth College for helpful comments. We are also grateful to Eric Yang and Eli Derrow for excellent research assistance.

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Do Newspapers Matter? Short-run and Long-run Evidence from the Closure of The Cincinnati Post

Cited by 46 publications

References 17 publications

Meet the Press: How Voters and Politicians Respond to Newspaper Entry and Exit

Meet the Press: How Voters and Politicians Respond to Newspaper Entry and Exit

Dead Newspapers and Citizens’ Civic Engagement

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

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