Chapter 17 - Media Capture: Empirical Evidence

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Abstract

This chapter overviews the empirical literature on the determinants and the consequences of media capture, i.e., the situation in which governments or other interest groups try to control the content of media outlets. We start by examining the evidence on the effect of media capture on the content of media outlets. Then we discuss the methods governments and other special interests use to control media. We review the literature on the determinants of media capture and the factors that affect the likelihood of media capture. Next, we present evidence on the effects of captured media on the behavior of people, as well as the effects of independent media in a captured environment. We conclude by discussing the factors that limit the effect of propaganda.

Introduction

Mass media are an important source of information about politics in most countries. Media reports have a potential to affect public opinion and to generate public support of particular politicians and policies. As a result, politicians have incentives to control the media whenever they see the opportunity to do so. The goal of this chapter is to see whether media capture indeed occurs, and, if it does, how it changes the way media and politics interact with each other.

One of the most detailed forensic examples of media capture is described in McMillan and Zoido (2004). Their paper studies Fujimori's Peru, where the head of secret police, Vladimir Montesinos, kept records of bribes paid by the government to different actors. The paper shows that directors of TV channels were offered much higher bribes, as compared with politicians or judges, so that in the end he paid 100 times more in bribes to media outlets than to all judges and politicians combined.1 In other words, mass media turned out to be the most expensive among checks and balances in the Peruvian political system. The heads of TV channels, in exchange, allowed Montesinos to review daily news programs before broadcasting, and to broadcast information about political candidates only with his written approval. Mass media also contributed to the fall of Fujimori's regime. When one of the videos showing bribe taking was leaked, one small unbribed TV channel started to show the video around the clock. Even controlled channels soon started to show the video, as they were losing their audience otherwise. To increase dissemination, people placed large TV sets in windows and in the streets, and the number of the regime's opponents quickly increased.

According to a Freedom House 2014 study, 44% of the world's population lives in countries with media environments that are not “free,” i.e., in which mass media are almost fully captured, while only one in seven people in the world live in countries where media is considered as “free.” In recent years, researchers have started to look into issues of media capture and its economic implications. Chapter 16 in this volume outlines the theoretical foundations of this literature.

The aim of this chapter is to overview empirical contributions to the study of the process of media capture. What evidence do we have for media capture around the world? When are media more likely to be captured, and what type of information is more likely to be censored? Do media have any real impact on people's behavior if some media outlets on the market are captured? What are the dark sides of transparency? Below we overview recent empirical papers focussed on these questions.

The outline of this chapter is as follows: Section 17.2 summarizes empirical evidence of media capture; Section 17.3 discusses the determinants of media capture and media freedom; Section 17.4 describes media effects in a captured environment; Section 17.5 discusses the limits of media capture, and Section 17.6 concludes.

Section snippets

Evidence on Media Capture

Is there any evidence that media capture indeed happens? Do media outlets behave differently if governments or interest groups have some means of controlling them? Do consumers of mass media take into account media capture? This section summarizes empirical evidence of media capture by governments and incumbent politicians and the way it affects media content.

Determinants of Media Capture

The extent of media capture depends on both the “demand for capture,” i.e., the incentives of government and other special interests to control media, and “supply of capture,” i.e., the willingness of the media outlets to change their content. Lack of political competition and direct government ownership of the media are likely to be important factors that make it easier for the government to control media (as summarized in Djankov et al., 2003), but that is not the only driving force. The

Media Effects in the Presence of Media Capture

Studying the causal impact of media is not straightforward, since the decision of media consumers which media product they would like to consume, if any, is endogenous. To convincingly identify media effects, one needs to find some source of exogenous variation in either media exposure or media content. Chapter 13 focuses on the study of media influence in competitive, non-captured environments, outlining the basic approaches to the identification of media effects. The goal of this section is

Limits of Media Capture

Although the existing research suggests that media capture can have an important effect, the efficiency of propaganda is limited by several mechanisms. First of all, if readers or viewers know that media are captured they can discount information coming from the biased sources. Bai et al. (2014) test this directly by looking at how people update their beliefs about air pollution in China after receiving information from either government-controlled or independent sources. They document that the

Conclusion

The empirical evidence overviewed in this chapter shows that media outlets can be captured, i.e., that the content of media can be determined by the preferences of governments or sponsoring groups rather than by the preferences of the audience. In this situation, the way media outlets operate and the mechanisms through which media outlets can affect people's behavior work differently, as compared with the case of a perfectly competitive media market. There are several implications from this

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