tailieunhanh - THE FOX NEWS EFFECT: MEDIA BIAS AND VOTING*

Applicants are required to provide scholarships to participants. These scholarships should correspond to at least 15% of the total number of participants and cover at least the participation fees. It is recommended that they also cover expenses for travel and subsistence. This requirement will be carefully verified at final report submission stage. The final report of the activity will include scholarship forms filled in and signed by the scholarship holders, stating the expenses covered by the applicant. In order to facilitate the cooperation between all European professionals, the applicants must offer. | THE FOX NEWS EFFECT MEDIA BIAS AND VOTING Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan Does media bias affect voting We analyze the entry of Fox News in cable markets and its impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000 the conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20 percent of U. S. towns. Fox News availability in 2000 appears to be largely idiosyncratic conditional on a set of controls. Using a data set of voting data for 9 256 towns we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained to percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion. I. Introduction Does the media affect voting behavior According to rational expectation theories voters filter out bias in reporting without being persuaded on average Bray and Kreps 1987 . Alternatively behavioral theories De Marzo Vayanos and Zwiebel 2003 and cognitive linguistics theories Lakoff 1987 suggest that voters are subject to media persuasion. Understanding the impact of the media is of interest not only for politics but also George Akerlof Stephen Ansolabehere Lawrence M. Bartels Robert Calo Arindrajit Dube Edward Glaeser Matthew Gentzkow Alan Gerber Jay Hamilton Lawrence Katz Alan Krueger Ulrike Malmendier Marco Manacorda Enrico Moretti Suresh Naidu Torsten Persson Sam Popkin Riccardo Puglisi Matthew Rabin Jesse Shapiro Uri Simonsohn Laura Stoker David Stromberg Daniel Sturm and audiences at Beijing University .