Ownership Ties, Conflicts of Interest and the Tone of News
Università della Svizzera italiana
Date: 17 May 2017 / 12:30 - 13:30
//
DAFC (Discourse Approaches to Financial Communication)
Lunch Seminar Series
"Ownership Ties, Conflicts of Interest and the Tone of News"
Guest speaker: Emanuele Bajo, Università di Bologna
Wednesday, May 17, 2017
12.30 – 13.30
room A 23, Red Building
USI Lugano campus
Emanuele Bajo, University of Bologna, will present his paper about ownership-related conflicts of interest in the media industry. The paper, co-authored by Marco Bigelli (University of Bologna) and Carlo Raimondo (Università della Svizzera italiana), investigates the tone used by newspapers in reporting information on a company, which is in a conflict of interest regarding ownership ties with the publishing firm. This issue is investigated by using Italy as empirical setting, a country characterized by a newspaper industry highly owned by nationally-dominant industrial groups. Based on a sample of about 123,000 articles, the authors document that newspapers produce larger coverage and a significantly smaller number of negative and uncertain words for firms with a conflict of interest. The authors also document that the slant is increasing with the incentive to favorable distort news (magnitude of the ownership stake) and decreasing with the newspaper’s reputation.
