| Tyrone Slothrop |
11-03-2025 08:42 PM |
The business of the culture war
This is stolen from Marginal Revolution. The following is from the job paper of a Harvard economist, and it seems so obvious to me that it's a little appalling that articulating it in this way needed to be done.
We show that American cable television news emphasizes race, crime, gender, and other “culture war” issues. These issues are less prominent in broadcast news and appear in only a small fraction of politicians’ campaign advertisements, which overwhelmingly focus on jobs, healthcare, and the economy. We interpret these differences through a parallel tradeoff facing cable outlets, broadcast outlets, and politicians: choosing content best for “poaching” people who would otherwise choose competitors vs. “mobilizing” people who would otherwise not watch news/not vote. Using household-by-second smart TV data, we link cable news’ cultural focus to a distinctive business strategy emphasizing mobilization: we show that cultural coverage mobilizes (many) viewers who would otherwise watch entertainment programming, while economic coverage instead poaches (fewer) viewers who would otherwise watch competing news channels. Cable news outlets, maximizing audience size, therefore prefer cultural coverage. Politicians, instead maximizing vote share , value poaching an opponent’s voter twice as much as mobilizing a nonvoter; giving news outlets the same objective would close 40% of the observed content gap between news and politicians. Cable outlets’ incentives to center cultural conflict influence politics: constituencies exogenously more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads. Our results suggest that the economic incentives of cable news played a significant role in the growth of cultural conflict.
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