The Causes and Consequences of Mass Media Content

该项目将应用经济学工具来研究媒体的社会影响。大众媒体、学术期刊和国会大厅中的激烈辩论指向了媒体对从考试成绩到谋杀率再到选举结果的方方面面的影响。然而，尽管存在跨越几个学科的大量文献，但关于这些影响的经验证据在很大程度上仍然没有定论。本研究将为填补这一空白做出两个广泛的贡献：(I)开发新的数据，这些数据将成为研究媒体效应的宝贵新资源；(Ii)将这些数据应用于研究三个特别感兴趣的特定主题。该项目的第一部分将衡量观看电视对儿童认知和教育发展的影响。一个关于电视进入不同地方市场时间的新数据集，结合科尔曼研究中1964年的测试分数，将确定学龄前接触电视对以后生活中标准化测试分数的因果影响。该项目的第二部分将研究报纸政治报道中“倾斜”的决定因素。关于报纸使用带有政治色彩的语言、对事件的选择性报道以及对当局的引用的新数据，将提供第一个全面的跨报纸和跨时间的倾斜图景。第二阶段的分析将确定倾斜对需求的影响，这种影响对消费者自身政治观点的依赖，以及报纸所有者目标函数的组成部分。项目的第三部分将询问在线可获得的丰富新闻来源如何影响消费者的新闻消费。两个主要的理论--一个认为消费者是受信息驱动的，另一个认为他们寻求确认他们之前的信念--对不断扩大的选择集的反应做出了截然不同的预测。关于在线新闻消费的小组数据被用来检验这些相互竞争的理论，并询问不断扩大的选择集如何改变政治信息在选民中的分布。更广泛的影响：除了对社会科学知识的贡献外，这个项目还将产生几个更广泛的影响。它将通过向教育工作者和家长提供有关电视的认知影响的信息，以及让本科生和研究生作为研究过程的积极参与者来促进学习。它将创造重要的数据资源，供其他研究人员免费使用，并为衡量新闻报道中的政治倾向提供一个新的方法模板。结果将通过领先的经济学期刊以及与政策制定者、从业者和媒体的接触来传播。最后，这些发现将直接为一些正在进行的辩论提供信息，并对家长、教育工作者、媒体行业参与者和政策制定者产生直接影响。

This project will apply economic tools to study the social impact of the media. Debates raging in the popular press, academic journals, and the halls of Congress point to effects of media on everything from test scores to murder rates to election outcomes. Despite the existence of large literatures across several disciplines, however, the empirical evidence on these effects remains largely inconclusive. The present research will make two broad contributions to filling this gap: (i) developing new data that will be a valuable new resource for the study of media effects; (ii) applying this data to study three specific topics of particular interest.The first part of the project will measure the effect of television viewing on the cognitive and educational development of children. A new dataset on the timing of television's introduction to different local markets, combined with 1964 test scores from the Coleman study, will identify the causal effect of preschool exposure to television on standardized test scores later in life. The second part of the project will study the determinants of "slant" in newspapers' political coverage. New data on newspapers' use of politically charged language, selective coverage of events, and citation of authorities will provide the first comprehensive picture of slant across newspapers and across time. Second-stage analysis will then identify the impact of slant on demand, the dependence of this impact on consumers' own political views, and the components of newspaper owners' objective functions.The third part of the project will ask how the profusion of news sources available online has impacted consumers' news consumption. Two leading theories--one viewing consumers as motivated by information, the other viewing them as seeking confirmation of their prior beliefs--make sharply different predictions about the response to an expanding choice set. Panel data on online news consumption are used to test these competing theories and ask how the expanding choice set has changed the distribution of political information across the electorate.Broader Impacts: Beyond its contribution to knowledge in the social sciences, this project will have several broader impacts. It will contribute to learning by providing information to educators and parents about the cognitive effects of television, as well as engaging undergraduate and graduate students as active participants in the research process. It will create important data resources that will be made freely available to other researchers, as well as a new methodological template for measuring political slant in news coverage. The results will be disseminated both through leading economics journals and through contacts with policy makers, practitioners, and the press. Finally, the findings will directly inform a number of ongoing debates with direct consequences for parents, educators, media industry participants, and policy makers.