Media freedom and Online-Offline Dissimilarity Indices

Ruben Enikolopov, Maria Petrova and Gleb Romanyuk

Working Paper from Harvard University OpenScholar

Abstract: The news topics discussed in traditional offline media like TV, radio and print newspapers differ from ones discussed in online media like blogs. The difference appears to be more evident in countries where traditional media is subject to censorship, heavily influenced by government, and, in short, not absolutely free. At the same time, blogosphere remains relatively free. In this paper, we provide a comparison between the topics discussed in online and offline media and develop an objective, automatically calculated index of media freedom. We find that the indices based on comparison of online and offline media are positively correlated with survey-based Freedom House indices for the sample of OECD countries and some developing countries. Our online-offline media index has an advantage over survey-based indices because it is computationally less costly. A theoretical model is built to illustrate how online media can be less biased than offline media when the government attempts to exert control over news sources in the country.

Date: 2011-01
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