News Media and Crime Perception Summary – Group 3

Previous studies have shown that media have a significant impact on political as well as
public policy outcomes . Masses in any country throughout the world reply on media in some
way to get information about issues that may be politically important. The paper asks
question that how strongly can media affect public perceptions ? Authors tried to estimate the
effect of media persuasion on the perceptions individual hold . The value addition of this
paper to existing literature is that in this paper author explore one possible channel . This
paper argues that understanding the role of information provided by the media on the
formation of beliefs and attitudes is crucial. The paper uses a natural experiment the non-
uniform introduction of the digital Tv signals in Italy , specifically focused on crime
perceptions and combining channel-specific viewership and content data. Authors especially
focused on crime perception for a number of reasons firstly crime ranks consistently among
first five most important perceived problems in several European countries including Italy.
Secondly crime perception has been proven to be relevant to several economic outcomes such
as mental health , daily routine behavior as well as housing prices and neighborhood quality .
The authors analyzed whether and to what extent individuals revise their perceptions once
exposure to news provided by Mr Silvio group is reduced ; which highly reports about crime
and related content. To take care of identification issues and to drive casual estimates the
authors used natural and non-uniform extend of digital Tv transmission in Italy. One
important limitation that must be kept in mind that the authors ascertain that the results were
driven by individuals aged 50 and over , who turn out to more exposed to television for
several reasons while using other sources of information to cross check less frequently . We
may get different results employing same methodology used by these authors If our data set
contain people aged less than 50. Interestingly a group of traditional analogue Tv channels
seems to systematically over represent crime news as compared to other and we found not
found any concrete ideology behind it , may be it was owners ideology or they know people
worry about their neighborhood quality therefore this sort of news will interest them and will
attract large number of viewers from different areas of Italy. Using a set of different
estimation procedures including Descriptive statistics , Multiple Linear regression , Linear
Probability Model (LPM) and Difference in Difference Regression (DID) the authors found
that the increase in the number of available Tv channels and the consequent lower exposure
to crime news – led individuals to revise their perceptions about crime . Moreover, estimated
negative effect on crime concern are larger for individuals who spend more time watching
television while using less frequently other media sources such as internet , radio and
newspaper to cross check actual crime rate figures . These individuals , by gathering
information mainly through Tv and placing high weight to information coming from it were
more likely to exposed to potential pre reform bias ( Digital Tv ) , thus naturally respond
more to changes in Tv content. As I discussed above for older individuals aged 50 or more
the probability of mentioning crime as among the top three priority problems in Italy drops
with the introduction of the digital signals by almost about 8 % points . The authors runned a
no of robustness checks including placebo effect of future switchover , Effect on individuals
not watching Tv , Effect on watching Time and other estimates were found consistent .