It has long been recognized that the media play an essential role in government accountability. However, even in the absence of censorship, the government may in ‡uence news content by maintaining a "cozy" relationship with the media. This paper develops a model of democratic politics in which media capture is endogenous.The model o¤ers insights into the features of the media market that determine the ability of the government to exercise such capture and hence to in ‡uence political outcomes.We are grateful to Silvia Pezzini for research assistance and to Carolee McLeish and Simeon Djankov for providing us with data. We thank Ben Bernanke and two anonymous referees for comments. We have also received helpful advice from Stephen Coate, Torsten Persson, Juan Pablo Rud, David Stromberg and a number of seminar participants.

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How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the effect of increased transparency on debate. Commentators have hypothesized both a beneficial discipline effect and a detrimental conformity effect. A difference-in-differences approach inspired by the career concerns literature uncovers evidence for both effects. However, the net effect of increased transparency appears to be a more informative deliberation process.Keywords: Monetary policy, deliberation, FOMC, transparency, career concerns JEL Codes: E52, E58, D78 * We would like to thank Francesco Amodio, Andrew Bailey, Francesco Caselli, Gilat Levy, Rick Mishkin, Emi Nakamura, Tommaso Nannicini, Bryan Pardo, Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey, Jón Steinsson, Dave Stockton, Thomas Wood, and Janet Yellen for insightful discussions. We are particularly grateful to Omiros Papaspiliopoulos for numerous helpful discussions on MCMC estimation and Refet S Gürkaynak for sharing the monetary policy surprise data. We have also benefited from comments and suggestions by seminar attendees at the San Francisco Federal Reserve, University of Warwick, University of Manchester, INSEAD, Bank of England, LSE, the New York Federal Reserve, Columbia University, the ESRI, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the CEP conference. We thank Eric Hardy for excellent research assistance in gathering biographical data, and the Bank of England's Research Donations Committee for seed corn financial support. Any errors remain ours alone.

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