Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals

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.