Mass Media and Special Interest Groups

Maria Petrova

No w0144, Working Papers from Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR)

Abstract: Media revenues are an important determinant of media behavior. News coverage depends not only on the preferences of media consumers but also on the preferences of advertisers or subsidizing groups. We present a theoretical model of the interaction between special interest groups and media outlets in which the media face a trade-off between a larger audience and lower payments from special interest groups versus a smaller audience and more biased content. We focus on the relationship between the costs of production of media product and the level of distortion in news coverage that can be introduced by interest groups. Speciically, we look at the effect of falling marginal costs or the growing reliance on advertising revenues. We show that if people do not want to tolerate bias, or if special interest groups have budget constraint, then this effect is negative. If people do not pay attention to bias, or if the size of the audience is very important for the interest group, then this effect becomes positive. If markets are fully covered, and all consumers buy one unit of media product, then the effect disappears.

Pages: 42 pages
Date: 2010-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-cul
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cefir.ru/papers/WP144.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Mass media and special interest groups (2012)
Working Paper: Mass Media and Special Interest Groups (2010)
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:cfr:cefirw:w0144

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Julia Babich ().