The Power of Propaganda: The Effect of U.S. Government Bias on Cold War News Coverage of Human Rights Abuses

This paper investigates the extent to which strategic objectives of the U.S. government influenced news coverage during the latter part of the Cold War (1976-88). We establish two reduced form relationships: 1) strategic objectives of the U.S. government causes the State Department to under-report human rights violations of political allies; and 2) these objectives reduce news coverage of human rights abuses for political allies in U.S. 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 provide evidence suggesting that goverment manipulation is the main underlying mechanism; and discuss the implications for the Besley and Prat (2006) model of media capture. (P16 Political Economy, L82 Media)