Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals

Abstract

We construct measures of the extent to which the four main newspapers in Argentina report government corruption on their front page during the period 1998–2007 and correlate them with government advertising. The correlation is negative. The size is considerable—a one standard deviation increase in monthly government advertising is associated with a reduction in the coverage of the government's corruption scandals of 0.23 of a front page per month, or 18 percent of a standard deviation in 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. (JEL D72, K42, L82, M37, O17)