Media Competition and Information Disclosure

Abstract

This paper analyzes an election game where self-interested politicians can exploit the lack of information that voters have about candidates' preferred policies in order to pursue their own agendas.In such a setup, we study the incentives of newspapers to acquire costly information, and how competition among the media affect such incentives. We show that the higher the number of potential readers and/or the lower the cost or investigating, the more the newspapers investigate. We also show that the readers' purchasing habits play a crucial role in the model. More specifically, we show that if the readers always buy a newspaper, media competition favors information disclosure; whereas if they just buy a newspaper in the case news are uncovered, competition is not so desirable.

Science writers: How they keep up

“…There is also competition between various media outlets to draw in audiences. Yet there is no consensus on how much competition improves (or degrades) the accuracy of science news (Andina-Díaz, 2009). Competition does potentially make it more difficult for outside organizations or government to silence or control the media, but competition may encourage media to bias their informationor put out erroneous information -to match their audience's beliefs or opinions in order to remain in business (Andina-Díaz, 2009).…”