中文摘要
我们利用匈牙利的数据，得出了关于政府与媒体之间关系的两项研究结果。（i）我们以实证证据表明，政府在广告投放方面给予关联媒体大量优待，关联媒体则在腐败报道方面给予政府大量优待。我们的实证策略利用媒体所有权变更及其他事件前后发生的剧烈重新配置，排除基于市场因素的解释。（ii）在结构模型的假设下，我们区分了驱动这些优待行为的两种机制：所有者的意识形态与利益交换。我们利用所有者不变时报道内容的变化进行识别并估计模型，发现两种机制都很重要。这些结果意味着，有针对性的政府广告投放可以对媒体内容产生实质性影响。反事实分析表明，有针对性的广告投放还可以通过使亲政府的关联投资者持有媒体所有权更有利可图，影响所有者的意识形态。我们的结果与许多民主国家的定性证据一致，并提示政府广告投放在全球范围内影响着媒体内容。
Abstract
We use data from Hungary to establish two results about the relationship between the government and the media. (i) We document large advertising favors from the government to connected media, and large corruption coverage favors from connected media to the government. Our empirical strategy exploits sharp reallocations around changes in media ownership and other events to rule out market‐based explanations. (ii) Under the assumptions of a structural model, we distinguish between owner ideology and favor exchange as the mechanism driving favors. We estimate our model exploiting within‐owner changes in coverage for identification and find that both mechanisms are important. These results imply that targeted government advertising can meaningfully influence content. Counterfactuals show that targeted advertising can also influence owner ideology, by making media ownership more profitable to pro‐government connected investors. Our results are consistent with qualitative evidence from many democracies and suggest that government advertising affects media content worldwide.