THE EFFECT OF ACCESS TO AN OBJECTIVE NEWS SOURCE ON PUBLIC AWARENESS, OPINION AND STATED INVOLVEMENT IN POLITICS { THE CASE OF HUNGARY

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of an objective media source in a situation where there have only been biased sources available, using the case study of Hungary. The Hungarian media-landscape has been characterized by soft censorship that has worsened since the election of the right wing party, Fidesz, in 2010. In June 2014, the Advertisement Tax Bill was passed creating a progressive advertisement revenue tax that was designed such that about half of its total revenues would be paid by RTL Klub, one of the major commercial TV channels. In response, RTL Klub changed its previous \de-politicized" news broadcast by increasing the total length of news and the fraction of time devoted to domestic political news and by creating investigative journalism news pieces. This paper uses a di -in-di analysis to investigate the impact of access to a news source that is not biased in favor of the government on how informed the public is, on how involved the public is with politics and on public opinion about politics and the economy. I use data from Nielsen LLC in Hungary, about the RTL Klub evening news watching habits of people by age-gender groups and individual survey data from the Ipsos Ltd's and T ARKI Foundation's public opinion polls. I nd that access to an objective media source has a positive impact on how informed the public is and it provides a means for being informed for people who have been involved with politics and are not in favor of the present government. At the same time, I do not nd a signi cant impact on public opinion about speci c politicians and on the left-right leaning of the public. Thus my results support the theory of con rmation bias (DellaVigna and Gentzkow, 2010) and the theory about the media choices of Bayesian consumers (Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2006) as well as that the objective news source does not reach everyone, since the ones in favor of the government follow other news outlets that are biased in the direction of their prior beliefs.