The Demand for News: Accuracy Concerns Versus Belief Confirmation Motives

Felix Chopra, Ingar K. Haaland and Christopher Roth

No 9673, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We examine the relative importance of accuracy concerns and belief confirmation motives in driving the demand for news. In experiments with US respondents, we first vary beliefs about whether an outlet reports the news in a right-wing biased, left-wing biased, or unbiased way. We then measure demand for a newsletter covering articles from this outlet. Respondents only reduce their demand for biased news if the bias is inconsistent with their own political beliefs, suggesting a trade-off between accuracy concerns and belief confirmation motives. We quantify this trade-off using a structural model and find a similar quantitative importance of both motives.

Keywords: news demand; media bias; accuracy concerns; belief confirmation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 D91 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp9673.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Demand for News: Accuracy Concerns Versus Belief Confirmation Motives (2024)
Working Paper: The Demand for News: Accuracy Concerns versus Belief Confirmation Motives (2024)
Working Paper: The Demand for News: Accuracy Concerns versus Belief Confirmation Motives (2023)
Working Paper: The Demand for News: Accuracy Concerns versus Belief Confirmation Motives (2022)
Working Paper: The Demand for News: Accuracy Concerns versus Belief Confirmation Motives (2022)
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:ces:ceswps:_9673

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().