Media Trust: Official versus Commercial Outlets

Xiaoli Guo
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Xiaoli Guo: Shanghai Institute of International Organization and Global Governance, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, No. 777 Guoding Road, Yangpu District, Shanghai 200433, China

Games, 2022, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-13

Abstract: This paper presents a simple formal theoretical model to explain why citizens in authoritarian regimes trust the illiberal official media more than the commercial media. Media trust is defined as changes in the citizen’s belief based on good or bad news from the media. Using this definition, the model evaluates the independent and interaction effect of media bias, censorship, media quality, the citizen’s prior belief of the situation, and the citizen’s ideology on media trust. The findings reconcile some controversies in the literature, and, more importantly, reveal new and subtle explanations the literature did not identify and probably needs to pay attention to.

Keywords: media trust; censorship; media quality; authoritarian regimes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C C7 C70 C71 C72 C73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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