Replication Data for: Capturing the Fourth Estate: Government Influence on U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Foreign Leaders

Governments worldwide seek to influence the stories reporters write. This article examines whether and how the U.S. government shapes the variations in domestic news outlets' coverage of foreign leaders across time and space. Leveraging data collected from five major U.S. newspapers on more than 1,500 foreign leaders, I find that U.S. news outlets, acting in line with the government's interests, tend to limit their coverage of human rights violators who are politically aligned with the United States, while providing more extensive reportage on those who are not. Further evidence suggests that such biased coverage is at least partly driven by the U.S. government's selective information provision during press briefings and through press releases. The findings have important implications for how we understand media bias and media capture in democratic societies.

世界各国政府均试图左右记者的新闻报道内容。本文旨在探究美国政府是否以及如何在跨时空维度上，影响美国国内新闻媒体对外国领导人报道的差异。笔者借助从美国五大主流报纸收集的、涉及1500余名外国领导人的相关数据开展研究后发现，美国新闻媒体会契合美国政府的利益诉求，往往会缩减对与美国政治立场一致的人权侵犯者的报道篇幅，却会对与美国立场相悖的外国领导人进行更为详尽的报道。进一步的研究证据表明，这种带有偏向性的报道，至少在一定程度上源于美国政府在新闻发布会及新闻通稿中选择性地提供信息。上述研究结果对于我们理解民主社会中的媒体偏向与媒体俘获（media capture）具有重要的启示意义。