Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States

Nicola Mastrorocco and Arianna Ornaghi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2025, vol. 17, issue 2, 285-318

Abstract: Do US municipal police departments respond to news coverage of local crime? We address this question exploiting an exogenous shock to local crime reporting induced by acquisitions of local TV stations by a large broadcast group, Sinclair. Using a unique dataset of 8.5 million news stories and a triple-differences design, we document that Sinclair ownership decreases news coverage of local crime. This matters for policing: Municipalities that experience the change in news coverage have lower violent crime clearance rates relative to municipalities that do not. The result is consistent with a decrease of crime salience in the public opinion.

JEL-codes: D83 G34 H76 K42 L13 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/pol.20230356 (application/pdf)
https://doi.org/10.3886/E202421V1 (text/html)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/materials/22893 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/materials/22894 (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States (2022)
Working Paper: Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States (2021)
Working Paper: Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States (2020)
Working Paper: Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States (2020)
Working Paper: Who Watches the Watchmen? Local News and Police Behavior in the United States (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aejpol:v:17:y:2025:i:2:p:285-318

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

DOI: 10.1257/pol.20230356

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy is currently edited by Matthew Shapiro

More articles in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().