Do People Value More Informative News
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SeriesMicro Seminars
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Speaker(s)Chris Roth (Briq Institute, Germany)
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FieldOrganizations and Markets
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LocationErasmus University Rotterdam, Mandeville Building, Room T3-34
Rotterdam -
Date and time
May 23, 2019
12:00 - 13:00
Abstract
We examine how perceptions of media bias affect demand for news. Drawing
on large representative samples of the US population with approximately 10,000
respondents, we measure and experimentally manipulate people’s beliefs about the
extent to which newspapers strategically suppress information. Inconsistent with the
“more-information-is-better principle,” we find that people who learn that a newspaper
is less likely to strategically suppress information have a lower demand for news
from this newspaper. The results from the main experiment and a series of follow-up
experiments demonstrate that people have a demand for biased news, consistent with
a desire to confirm pre-existing beliefs. We discuss the implications of our findings
for the regulation of media markets.