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 in the official record as campaign finance and lobbying expenditures, anecdotal evidence suggests that 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 advertisement in media outlets as a strategic tool to align such outlets’ coverage, and ultimately the political preferences of the respective audiences, with their particular interests. Based on several complementary empirical strategies, we find that advertisement spending from such actors (i) increases during election periods with respect to the counterfactual, (ii) is associated with less and more skeptical leaning climate change newspaper coverage, and (iii) tends to increase Republican vote shares in presidential races.