TY  - JOUR
AU  - Qian,Nancy
AU  - Yanagizawa,David
TI  - Watchdog or Lapdog? Media and the U.S. Government
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15738
PY  - 2010
Y2  - February 2010
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15738
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15738.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Nancy Qian
Department of Economics
Yale University
27 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06520-8269
E-Mail: nancy.qian@yale.edu

David Yanagizawa
Stockholm University, IIES
E-Mail: david.yanagizawa@gmail.com
AB  - This paper investigates the extent to which strategic objectives of the U.S. government influenced news coverage during the Cold War. We establish two relationships: 1) strategic objectives of the U.S. government cause the State Department to under-report human rights violations of strategic allies; and 2) these objectives reduce news coverage of human rights abuses for strategic allies in six U.S. national newspapers. To establish causality, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in a country's strategic value to the U.S. from the interaction of its political alliance to the U.S. and membership on the United Nations Security Council. In addition to the main results, we are able to provide qualitative evidence and indirect quantitative evidence to shed light on the mechanisms underlying the reduced form effects.
ER  -