In this podcast we discuss the economics of the media and its intersection with technological change. Our guest is Ananya Sen of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. Ananya is an expert in using new types of data and clever statistical methods to study the effects of the media. We start by discussing the literature on the effects of media on outcomes such as voter turnout and academic achievement. Next, we move on to a discussion of media slant and whether it’s driven by the preferences of viewers or the preferences of the newspaper’s owners or supplies. We finish by talking about how digital technology is affecting the structure of the media. Perhaps surprisingly, Ananya tells us that the existing literature on filter bubbles and polarization suggests that people are not more polarized online than offline.
References:
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- Clicks and Editorial Decisions: How Does Popularity shape Online News Coverage? by Ananya Sen and Pinar Yildirim
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- Television and Voter Turnout by Matthew Gentzkow
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- Preschool Television Viewing and Adolescent Test Scores Historical Evidence from the Coleman Study by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro
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- What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from U.S. Daily Newspapers by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro
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- Ideological Segregation Online and Offline by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro
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- Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook by Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing and Lada Adamic
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- Media Bias and Influence: Evidence from Newspaper Endorsements by Chun-Fang Chiang and Brian Knight
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- The Orientation of Newspaper Endorsements in U.S. Elections, 1940–2002 by Stephen Ansolabehere, Rebecca Lessem and James M. Snyder Jr.