"No Hatred or Malice, Fear or Affection": Media and Sentencing

Arnaud Philippe and Aurélie Ouss

Journal of Political Economy, 2018, vol. 126, issue 5, 2134 - 2178

Abstract: We explore how television broadcasting of unrelated criminal justice events affects sentencing. Exploiting as-good-as-random variation in news content before a verdict, we find that sentences are 3 months longer when the verdict is reached after coverage of crime. Sentences increase with media exposure to crime, not crime itself, and the effect tapers off quickly. Our results suggest that professional experience and expertise mitigate the effect of irrelevant external information. This paper highlights the influence of noise in the news cycle: media can temporarily influence decisions by changing what is top of the mind rather than signaling deeper changes in offending or societal concerns.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/699210 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/699210 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
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:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/699210

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().