The War of Ideas: Institutions and Global Media Bias

We present the first systematic analysis of how countries cover each other in the news, using a newly constructed dataset of 55,240 media sources from 176 countries between 2015 and 2022, drawing upon a corpus of 1.4 billion online news articles. We document a pattern of global media bias: countries with greater differences in democracy levels systematically portray each other more negatively, shaping both the sentiment and thematic content of coverage. This bias is especially pronounced when less democratic countries report on liberal democracies, when state-controlled media is involved, or when the reporting country experiences economic downturns or political turmoil. We corroborate these findings exploiting episodes of democratic erosion in a difference-in-differences design. Using similarities in how countries report on third countries, we construct and introduce a novel granular measure of global media alliances. Finally, we show that cross-country media sentiment predicts subsequent public attitudes.