Lobbying in Disguise

The ability of private interests to influence the political process is an important topic
in economics and political science. While some of these efforts appear as campaign
finance and lobbying expenditures in the official record, private interests may also
engage in “covert” influence through media capture. In this paper, we systematically
examine whether and to what extent corporations in the United States with interests
in slowing climate action might have used corporate advertisements in media outlets
as a strategic tool to align such outlets’ coverage with their particular interests.
Based on several complementary empirical strategies, we find that advertisement
spending from such actors (i) increases during election periods and (ii) is associated
with less and more skeptical leaning coverage of climate change.