Gregory Martin (Alesina Seminar)
Date and Time
Location
Speaker & Title
Greg Martin (Stanford), "Agenda Setting and Market Power in Online News"
Abstract
How much power do news outlets have to "set the agenda:" to determine what events their audience hears about and which topics it thinks are important? The answer is essential to understanding the political impacts of changes in media ownership and editorial direction. Using a large panel of online news readership and extensive data on article-level news content for over 4000 online news outlets, we decompose demand for news into two components: stable interest in certain topics, and trust in favored outlets to determine which topics are important each day. Our estimates reveal substantial heterogeneity across outlets and across readers. Most outlets have effectively zero influence over their audience's information diet, but a small number of influential outlets exercise substantial agenda setting power. We use our model estimates to conduct a variety of counterfactual exercises that illuminate the informational consequences of changes to the supply side of the news market.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.