Dissertation Project

In my dissertation, I aim to answer the following questions: “how can we explain the variation we see in political media capture strategies?”, “what are the effects of media capture strategies on pro-government coverage?” and “how does ownership characteristics and structure determine media bias?”.

To answer the first question, I use a formal model of political capture and explore the conditions under which a particular media capture strategy emerges as an equilibrium. For the second question, I use newspaper content data from Turkey and construct a measure of pro-government coverage to analyze the effects of media capture strategies on the content. Lastly, I use data from the US local newspaper market to understand how ownership characteristics and structure determine media bias.