Influential news and policy-making

Abstract This paper analyzes the implications of interventions that affect the costs of misreporting. I study a model of communication between an uninformed voter and a media outlet that knows the quality of two competing candidates. The alternatives available to the voter are endogenously championed by the two candidates. I show that higher costs may lead to more misreporting and persuasion, whereas low costs result in full revelation. The voter may be better off when less informed because of higher costs. When the media receives policy-independent gains, interventions that increase misreporting costs never directly harm the voter. However, lenient interventions that increase these costs by small amounts can be wasteful of public resources. Regulation produced by politicians leads to suboptimal interventions.