The War of Ideas: Institutions and Global Media Bias

We present the first systematic evidence of global media bias using a newly constructed sample of 1.4 billion news articles issued by 57,815 distinct media sources from 176 countries between 2015 and 2022. These articles are issued by media outlets from one country covering issues in another. We find that institutional distance between the media reporting country and the target country shapes the sentiment of the news articles, suggesting global media bias between countries. This effect becomes more pronounced when authoritarian countries cover democratic countries, when state-controlled media is present, or when the reporting country experiences an economic downturn or inflation. This media bias extends beyond political topics and encompasses a variety of social and economic issues as well. Our findings are confirmed by a natural experiment of regime shifts among the reporting countries. Additional analysis suggests potential economic losses stemming from these ideological conflicts, as evidenced by their relationship with both equity and loan markets.