Political Accountability, Electoral Control and Media Bias

Are anti-establishment mass media really useful in preventing politicians from behaving dishonestly? This paper models the direction of media bias, and shows that the probability of a dishonest action by an incumbent is higher (than that in the case of no media bias) if and only if the mass media have some degree of “anti-incumbent” bias (i.e. information favourable to the incumbent is converted into unfavourable news about the incumbent with a positive probability), provided that the incumbent is less likely to be opportunistic than a challenger in the upcoming election. This result holds irrespective of the degree of “pro-incumbent” bias.