The Media and the State: Historical Evidence from U.S. Newspapers

广泛的法律和监管传统嵌入了关于媒体市场结构如何影响民主表现的假设。检验这些假设需要来自市场结构变化的丰富数据，报纸内容的量化衡量，以及识别媒体市场对政治市场影响的可信策略。该项目使用来自美国的新数据来满足这些要求，并为媒体在社会中的角色带来新的基本问题。第一部分评估了媒体市场对政治参与和竞争力的影响。该分析补充了关于媒体曝光对政治参与的影响的现有证据有限。它超越了现有证据，着眼于这些影响如何随市场结构而变化：即，媒体空间行为者的数量和多样性如何在参与和候选人选择方面影响政治进程。第二部分研究报纸激励如何塑造媒体市场的意识形态多样性。它使用了新的数据和方法，首次对竞争者在场的情况下媒体倾向性的决定进行了实证研究。它使用结果来回答有关消费者的品味、竞争和其他因素如何影响多样性程度和少数群体观点的代表性的问题。第三部分研究了报业所有权整合的动因及影响。它使用新闻市场的经济表现数据来评估整合的其他解释，并分析其对市场表现的影响。它还试图解释20世纪跨市场所有权整合的主要趋势，并测试它是否与市场集中度内的趋势有关。广泛的影响：该项目产生了迄今为止关于美国日报历史的最全面的数据档案。这对所有社会科学和人文科学学科的传媒史学者都有广泛的用处。该项目在与新闻媒体对社会的影响和媒体市场结构的适当监管有关的关键政策问题上提供了重要的经验证据。该项目还创造了机会，利用一种新的数据集培训本科生和研究生进行实证研究，这可能会成为独立研究的有用起点。

Extensive legal and regulatory traditions embed hypotheses about how media market structure affects the performance of democracy. Testing those hypotheses requires rich data from a setting with variation in market structure, quantitative measures of newspaper content, and plausible strategies for identifying effects of media markets on political markets. This project uses novel data from the United States to fulfill these requirements and bring new light to fundamental questions about the role of media in society. The first part assesses the effect of media markets on political participation and competitiveness. The analysis supplements limited existing evidence on the effect of media exposure on political participation. It goes beyond existing evidence in looking at how those effects vary with market structure: i.e., how the number and diversity of actors in the media space impacts the political process, both in terms of participation and candidate selection. The second part studies how newspapers' incentives shape the ideological diversity of the media market. It uses new data and methods to conduct the first ever empirical study of the determination of media slant in the presence of competitors. It uses the results to answer questions about how consumer tastes, competition, and other factors affect the degree of diversity and the representation of minority views. The third part studies the causes and effects of ownership consolidation in the newspaper industry. It uses data on the economic performance of news markets to assess alternative explanations for consolidation and analyze its effects on market performance. It also attempts to explain the major twentieth century trend towards cross-market ownership consolidation, and tests whether it is related to trends in within market concentration.Broader Impacts: This project produces by far the most comprehensive data archive to date on the history of U.S. daily newspapers. This will be of broad use to scholars of media history in all social science and humanities disciplines. The project provides important empirical evidence on key policy questions relating to the effects of the news media on society and the appropriate regulation of media market structure. The project also creates opportunities to train undergraduate and graduate students in empirical research using a novel dataset that may form a useful starting point for independent research.