Nature Is Weird
/ Economics
If a town loses its factory to international trade, the local newspaper actually starts changing its political tone.
The Takeaway
When a community is hit by economic shocks like NAFTA, local media outlets shift their tone toward the political right. This happens even for stories that have nothing to do with trade or the economy.
Original Paper
Trade Shocks and Media Slant
SSRN · 6259678
From the abstract
Does trade liberalization reshape the political language of local news? I scale over 52 million newspaper articles against the evolving political vocabulary of the U.S. House of Representatives and use an event study exploiting variation in NAFTA exposure across commuting zones. Trade-exposed newspapers underwent a systematic rightward shift: the share of Republican-leaning articles increased by 9.6 percentage points for a topversus-bottom-quartile difference in trade vulnerability. The shift is