Abstract

We study when and why false statements by politicians become fake news, i.e. when statements made by politicians are reported by some media outlets without debunking even though the media knows those statements to be false. We study in particular how media competition affects both the incentives for politicians to provide such false statements and the incentives for media outlets to point out the falseness of such statements. We consider a setting in which media outlets care both about their readership and about the ideological leaning of the election winner. Hence, competing media outlets face two contests, the first over readership, the second over ideology, with overlapping yet conflicting incentives. We show how media outlets can manipulate information flows to advance a particular ideological agenda and how a politician can use false statements to enhance the ability of news media that support her candidacy to manipulate ideologically like-minded voters more effectively. We then show how the occurence of fake news increases with the political interest of the media, and the level of polarisation among voters. Finally, we find that media competition has an ambiguous effect on the occurence of fake news: having media outlets on opposite sides of the political spectrum reduces the occurrence of fake news compared to a setting with a single media, but having additional media outlets with a similar ideological bias may increase rather than decrease the occurrence of fake news.

Reference

Patrick Le Bihan (Sciences Po, Paris), “False Statements and Fake News, co-authored with Dimitri Landa and Cathy Hafer”, IAST Lunch Seminar, Toulouse: IAST, April 19, 2022, 12:45–13:45, room Auditorium 4.