Replication Data for: Panem et circenses: removing political news to generate electoral support, evidence from Berlusconi's Italy

This paper examines the strategic use of public news media – specifically television (TV) – as an instrument of political influence, focusing on Italy's 2011 financial crisis under Berlusconi's premiership. Using an original large corpus of over 20,000 hours of televised news transcripts and a quasi-experimental design, we investigate how political influence altered media coverage and, subsequently, public opinion and electoral outcomes. Our difference-in-differences analysis, complemented by unsupervised text scaling of news content, reveals a significant shift from “hard” political news to “soft” news on public TV during Berlusconi's tenure. Findings suggest a deliberate reduction in hard news coverage by an average of 107 seconds daily, which significantly increased voter support for Berlusconi's party. In the conclusions, we discuss the broader implications of our findings for media independence in Western democracies amid the emergence of artificial intelligence-generated news contents and the prevalence of algorithmically tailored news feeds.

本研究探讨了公共新闻媒体——具体为电视（Television, TV）——作为政治影响力工具的策略性运用，聚焦贝卢斯科尼执政时期意大利2011年金融危机。本研究依托逾20000小时电视新闻转录文本的原创大型语料库，结合准实验设计，探究政治影响力如何改变媒体报道内容，并进而影响公众舆论与选举结果。本研究的双重差分分析辅以新闻内容的无监督文本标度，结果显示，在贝卢斯科尼执政期间，公共电视的报道出现了从"硬"政治新闻向"软"新闻的显著转向。研究结果表明，硬新闻报道被刻意缩减，日均缩减时长达107秒，这一变化显著提升了选民对贝卢斯科尼所在政党的支持率。在结论部分，我们探讨了在人工智能生成新闻内容兴起与算法定制化新闻推送愈发普遍的背景下，本研究结果对西方民主国家媒体独立性的更广泛启示。