In constituencies more exposed to cable news, people report more culture-war issues and fewer economic issues in response to Gallup's "Most Important Problem" surveys.

Local politicians respond by airing more culture-war campaign ads.

This arguably supported an equilibrium of vertical competition over dry, factual "hard news" focused more on economic issues and less on culture war issues.

(Of course, even then, the broadcast networks were criticized for their occasional sensationalism.)

... were loss-leaders focused on burnishing the network's prestige and satisfying regulators that the network was behaving in the public interest. (see quote below by Marc Gunther, 1999)

The broadcast networks also faced very little competition for attention. They were the only game in town.

But we do our best, exploiting variation in campaign advertising across 3,000 House, Senate, and Governor candidates and interpreting results as suggestive (not necessarily causal).

In politics, economically-focused campaigns perform _better_ than culture-war focused ones.

But crucially, our smart TV data lets us observe people as they *switch between* different channels.

Relative to cultural coverage, economic coverage _reduces_ the flow of people switching to competing news channels (i.e., it achieves a poaching gain)...

(We can even look at variation in content _within_ a given one-hour episode!)

Shifting from an all-economic to all-cultural 15-minute segment reduces viewership by about 2.2%, roughly one-sixth the penalty associated with a commercial advertising break.

... while a politician interested in maximizing their vote *share* values each poached voter twice as much as each mobilized voter.

In this example, a politician will prefer the poaching-focused strategy at the top, while a cable news outlet will prefer the mobilization-focused strategy below

Fact 2: the issues disproportionately covered in the younger cable news outlets, compared to the older broadcast news outlets, have seen the largest growth since 1996 (the year Fox News and MSNBC started broadcasting) in their perceived importance to voters

... and substantially more than broadcast news. The entry of cable news channels in the 1980s and 1990s substantially increased the supply of culture war coverage on the news.

We compile data on the contents of politicians' campaign advertisements and broadcast TV news coverage back to the 1960s, and cable news coverage back to the entry of cable outlets in the 1980s and 1990s.

Fact 1: cable news outlets talk about culture war issues *much more* than politicians...

🚨 new working paper with Aakaash Rao (his JMP!)

Why has American politics become engulfed by a "culture war" in recent decades? We trace the culture war back to changes in the media environment in the 1980s/1990s and to the distinctive economic incentives of viewership-maximizing news outlets

never felt more apt than this week

my “no guns at the Cheesecake Factory” sign is raising questions already answered by the sign

model railroad in a toy store, ft a police officer trying to disrupt a railroad workers’ picket

nominative determinism in action?