IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/qsh/wpaper/460971.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Media freedom and Online-Offline Dissimilarity Indices

Author

Listed:
  • Ruben Enikolopov
  • Maria Petrova
  • Gleb Romanyuk

Abstract

The news topics discussed in traditional offline media like TV, radio and print newspapers differ from ones discussed in online media like blogs. The difference appears to be more evident in countries where traditional media is subject to censorship, heavily influenced by government, and, in short, not absolutely free. At the same time, blogosphere remains relatively free. In this paper, we provide a comparison between the topics discussed in online and offline media and develop an objective, automatically calculated index of media freedom. We find that the indices based on comparison of online and offline media are positively correlated with survey-based Freedom House indices for the sample of OECD countries and some developing countries. Our online-offline media index has an advantage over survey-based indices because it is computationally less costly. A theoretical model is built to illustrate how online media can be less biased than offline media when the government attempts to exert control over news sources in the country.

Suggested Citation

  • Ruben Enikolopov & Maria Petrova & Gleb Romanyuk, 2011. "Media freedom and Online-Offline Dissimilarity Indices," Working Paper 460971, Harvard University OpenScholar.
    • Handle: RePEc:qsh:wpaper:460971
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://scholar.harvard.edu/gromanyuk/node/460971
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:qsh:wpaper:460971. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Richard Brandon (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cbrssus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.