TThe Power of Propaganda: The Effect of U.S. Government Bias on Cold War News Coverage of Human Rights Abuses

Abstract

This paper investigates the extent to which the government can strategically distort a free media market by examining the e¤ect of the U.S. State Department's bias in human rights reporting on coverage in the New York Times. To establish causality, we exploit a novel source of variation in the strategic value of a country to the U.S. government. We show that the State Department favorably under-reports abuses in countries that it values strategically. This reduces news coverage by approximately 28% from what it should be. Our findings suggest that these distortions are not likely to be consumer driven. (P16 Political Economy, L82 Media) The need for high-quality reporting is greater than ever. It's not just the journalist's job at risk here. It's American democracy. Walter Cronkite in a speech at Columbia University, January, 2007.