Media Capture in a Democracy: The Role of Wealth Concentration

By G. Corneo. Social Science Research Network, 2005

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Since objective news coverage is vital to democracy, captured media can seriously distort collective decisions. The current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from the mass media. The media might however secretly collude with interest groups in order to influence the public opinion. In the case of voting over the level of a productivity-enhancing public bad, it is shown that an increase in the concentration of firm ownership makes the occurrence of media bias more likely. Although media bias is not always welfare worsening, conditions for it to raise welfare are restrictive.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b7b7534450fef0e4c8527b4415bf14b840252de

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Citations in the corpus

Media and Politics (2015, background): “For example, Corneo (2006) studies capture by interest groups and finds that this is more likely the more concentrated is ownership, and Petrova (2009) studies media capture by the rich and finds that this is more likely, the more skewed is the income distribution.”
Inequality and Media Capture (2008, unknown): “Corneo (2006), using an approach similar to that of Grossman and Helpman (2001),5 finds that there is a positive relationship between the ownership concentration for a media outlet and the probability of media capture.”