Media Ownership and News Coverage of International Conflict Matthew Baum Yuri Zhukov Harvard Kennedy School University of Michigan matthew
[email protected] [email protected] How do differences in ownership of media enterprises shape news coverage of international conflict? We examine this relationship using a new dataset of 591,532 articles on US-led multinational military opera- tions in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo, published by 2,505 newspapers in 116 countries. We find that ownership chains exert a homogenizing effect on the content of newspapers’ coverage of foreign pol- icy, resulting in coverage across co-owned papers that is more similar in scope (what they cover), focus (how much “hard” relative to “soft” news they offer), and diversity (the breadth of topics they include in their coverage of a given issue) relative to coverage across papers that are not co-owned. However, we also find that competitive market pressures can mitigate these homogenizing effects, and incentivize co-owned outlets to differentiate their coverage. Restrictions on press freedom have the opposite impact, increasing the similarity of coverage within ownership chains. February 27, 2018 What determines the information the press reports about war? This question has long concerned polit- ical communication scholars (Hallin 1989, Entman 2004). Yet it is equally important to our understanding of international conflict. Prevailing international relations theories that take domestic politics into account (e.g., Fearon 1994, 1995, Lake and Rothschild 1996, Schultz 2001) rest on the proposition that the efficient flow of information – between political leaders and their domestic audiences, as well as between states involved in disputes – can mitigate the prevalence of war, either by raising the expected domestic political costs of war or by reducing the likelihood of information failure.1 Yet models of domestic politics have long challenged the possibility of a perfectly informed world (Downs 1957: 213).