Working Paper: NBER ID: w15738
Authors: Nancy Qian; David Yanagizawa-Drott
Abstract: This paper investigates the extent to which strategic objectives of the U.S. government influenced news coverage during the Cold War. We establish two relationships: 1) strategic objectives of the U.S. government cause the State Department to under-report human rights violations of strategic allies; and 2) these objectives reduce news coverage of human rights abuses for strategic allies in six U.S. national newspapers. To establish causality, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in a country's strategic value to the U.S. from the interaction of its political alliance to the U.S. and membership on the United Nations Security Council. In addition to the main results, we are able to provide qualitative evidence and indirect quantitative evidence to shed light on the mechanisms underlying the reduced form effects.
Keywords: government distortion; media; human rights; Cold War; US foreign policy
JEL Codes: L82; P16
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| US government strategic objectives (L21) | State Department underreporting human rights violations (J83) |
| US government strategic objectives (L21) | news coverage of human rights abuses in US newspapers (P14) |
| political alliance with the US + UNSC membership (F53) | government manipulation of media coverage (M38) |
| political alliance with the US (F52) | distortion in news coverage (C46) |