NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals

Rafael Di Tella, Ignacio Franceschelli

NBER Working Paper No. 15402
Issued in October 2009
NBER Program(s):   POL

We construct measures of the extent to which the 4 main newspapers in Argentina report government corruption in their front page during the period 1998-2007 and correlate them with the extent to which each newspaper is a recipient of government advertising. The correlation is negative. The size is considerable: a one standard deviation increase in monthly government advertising (0.26 million pesos of 2000) is associated with a reduction in the coverage of the government’s corruption scandals by 0.31 of a front page per month, or 25% of a standard deviation in our measure of coverage. The results are robust to the inclusion of newspaper, month, newspaper*president and individual-corruption scandal fixed effects as well as newspaper*president specific time trends.

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This paper was revised on December 5, 2011

Acknowledgments

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